Microsoft’s CEO says Xbox ‘will have a catalog of games using generative AI’
Satya Nadella thinks Xbox’s new generative AI model is “a massive moment of, ‘wow’
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said it’s planning to have a catalog of video games utilize its new generative AI mode, ‘Muse’.
Announced earlier this week, Microsoft’s Muse is a generative AI model that it says can generate “game visuals, controller actions, or both.”
In its announcement, Microsoft showed how Muse could generate game visuals using training data from Ninja Theory’s 2020 game Bleeding Edge.
Commenting on Muse in an interview published this week, Nadella compared Muse to the ‘wow’ moment he said he felt when he first saw other generative AI models such as ChatGPT. According to Nadella, Microsoft is already planning to utilize generative AI in multiple games.
“It’s just very cool… one thing that we wanted to go after was, using gameplay data, can you actually generate games that are both consistent and then have the ability to generate the diversity of what that game represents and then are persistent to user mods, right? So that’s what this is,” he told the Dwarkesh Podcast.
“The cool thing is what I’m excited about is bringing… we’re going to have a catalog of games soon that we will start using these models, or we’re going to train these models to generate, and then start playing them.
“In fact, when Phil Spencer first showed it to me, where he had an Xbox controller and this model basically took the input and generated the output based on the input and it was consistent with the game.
“And that to me is a massive, massive moment of, ‘wow’. It’s kind of like the first time we saw ChatGPT complete sentences or Dolly draw or Sora, this is kind of one such moment.”
Like in most creative industries, Generative AI has become a hot topic in video games, with many voicing concerns about generative AI leading to job losses and widespread plagiarism.
Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick recently said that not only does he think AI won’t lead to job losses, he believes it could lead to increased employment. He also said that he couldn’t think of any new guardrails that might be required to protect developers.
Speaking to VGC, Split Fiction and It Takes Two director Josef Fares said he thinks developers should work with AI rather than push against it and called it “both scary and very exciting.”
