The Big Inworld AI Q&A – ‘Everyone in Gaming Sees the Potential of Generative AI’

Shortly after generative AI became the hottest topic in pretty much every industry, Inworld started making headlines in 2023 with its Character Engine technology that was first implemented in a series of PC games (Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Grand Theft Auto V) by modder Bloc.

A few months later, Inworld announced a new round of funding from big investors (including Microsoft, Samsung, and LG) that brought the company's total valuation to $500 million. The gaming industry's attention toward their dynamic NPCs technology was confirmed when Microsoft revealed a partnership to develop a multiplatform AI-powered toolset for game creators. Then, at the GDC 2024 event in San Francisco, California, Inworld stole the limelight with three demos created with NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Ubisoft.

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Following that event, I contacted Inworld to set up an interview to cover these high-profile partnerships, the future roadmap of their technology, and potential issues for studios and end users, such as costs. I talked to Nathan Yu, General Manager of Inworld's Labs, for around half an hour; you can read the whole transcript of our conversation below.

At GDC 2024, I wrote that Inworld AI 'blew up', which was not at all an exaggeration from my point of view. You pretty much stole the show by presenting three demos made with big partners like Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Ubisoft. What was it like?

Overall, it was incredible. Under the hood, we've been working on all three fronts with Ubisoft, NVIDIA, and Microsoft for a while now. It was great to see them all land solidly at GDC. They all push the boundaries of our technology in different areas, with Ubisoft specifically going beyond dialogue as a key theme that we've been focusing on at Inworld. How does AI play a more integral impact on core gameplay mechanics and player progression? We really started to see a lot of those nuances come