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We Taught AI to Play Games—Now It’s a $3.6 Million Company

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We Taught AI to Play Games—Now It’s a $3.6 Million Company

AI & I

2025/10/15
AI & I

AI & I

2025/10/15
OverviewShownoteHighlightsTranscriptChaptersPins

Shownote

This episode is a little different from our usual fare: It’s a conversation with our head of AI training Alex Duffy about Good Start Labs, a company he incubated inside Every. Today, Good Start Labs is spinning out of Every as a separate company with $3.6 ...

Highlights

In this episode, Dan Shipper sits down with Alex Duffy, former head of AI training at Every and founder of Good Start Labs, to explore an unconventional yet powerful idea: using games to shape the future of artificial intelligence. What began as an experimental project has evolved into a standalone venture backed by top investors, signaling growing confidence in the role of play as a catalyst for AI advancement.
04:21
Models differ in map understanding and ability to follow structured orders in Diplomacy
07:15
Claude lost the game due to being too honest, highlighting how behavior affects performance
13:05
Alex Duffy's company raised a few million dollars for AI and gaming ventures
21:09
Models trained in games can generalize better to real-world tasks
22:39
AI should be allowed to 'play around' and learn dynamically like a three-year-old nephew.
25:36
Games like RuneScape offer meaningful cognitive engagement through low-stakes experimentation
26:59
Games are ideal environments for models to learn long-horizon thinking and continual development
35:28
People using AI tools fear them less as they understand their flaws and benefits.
44:08
Tech should enhance human experiences, not distract from them
44:37
Generative AI could transform real-world actions into game-like scenarios through video-to-video models.
53:47
Inexperienced but hungry individuals are better suited to adapt than those burdened by outdated methods

Chapters

Start
00:00
Introduction
01:48
Why evals and benchmarks are broken
04:14
The sneakiest LLMs in the market
07:13
A competition that turns prompting into a sport
13:00
Building a business around using games to make AI better
15:49
Can language models learn how to be funny
22:39
Why games are a great way to evaluate and train new models
25:31
What child psychology tells us about games and AI
26:58
Using games to unlock continual learning in AI
30:10
Why Alex cares deeply about games
36:42
Where Alex sees the most promise in AI
44:37
Rethinking how young people start their careers in the age of AI
50:54

Transcript

Alex Duffy: While I was leading AI training and consulting at Every, my co-founder, Tyler and I built out a game so we could learn more about different AI models. Through how they negotiated, collaborated, and even betrayed one another. We got a whole lot ...