Tin Nguyen: Gaming IP in the Age of AI

Transcript

you're now plugged in to the deli podcast hey guys and welcome back to another episode of the deli podcast today I am delighted to introduce you all to Tin the founder of Cipher um one of the founders that we backed uh on on the ventures front quite a few years ago now and have been continually impressed with the uh Relentless shipping coming out of this ecosystem so tin very excited to have you here it's a great pleasure to be here man perhaps you could um kick us off and give us a quick snapshot summary of your background I know you had a relatively unconven path towards gaming so perhaps you could give the audience a flavor of that before we dig in sure uh without dragging on too long my uh my in my previous life uh I used to be working in the real estate

industry as a matter of fact I was a CEO of a large real estate developer it's a family business uh we've been around for 30 plus years and we built high-rise condos office building Villas and everything so I was doing that for a good eight years uh my background is was also in property construction so you know that's where all the training and learning and uh you know real working my working experience H and then yeah I mean I fell in love with crypto about three years plus back and I thought this space is full of innovation full of like new ideas and just people want to willing to try things and I was so fascinated by it and then of course fell in love with the whole Bitcoin ethereum ideology so I basically dropped everything and uh took a chance with

this new Venture and luck I got the people like yourself uh the other investor who were very supportive and uh back made this vision and uh fast forward to now three years after that you know we still have a a very strong growing team of 140 people in the studio uh we are passionate we're building amazing gaming and AI blockchain experiences so uh yeah I cannot be more more happy to be here man good man I love that didn't realize it's 140 now that's uh yeah very very very impressive to still be still be tracking with a big team um I'm curious and what exactly was it that uh appealed to you about gaming like what was it that Drew you towards that and you that that side of opportunity in the in the industry I think that's the easy part I think we all grew up playing games in our

generation I I used to I mean my parents uh got me into gaming when I was six years old and playing Dr Mario and they were like pvping each other at night and I was just watching all that growing up and you know they they brought me my computer they brought me my consoles and yeah I mean I just I was a massive gamer and and then when I got into even more a bit more hardcore gaming when it comes to know Warcraft 3 DotA I placed a lot of DOTA a ton of it during uh you know high school and University and then Starcraft too I was you know really want to be competitive in that scene over though I suck at it but uh I think I think gaming really uh first and foremost really is an escape it really helps you just uh forget all the all the

stress outside and just uh be be lost in this like amazing world that the Traders make and then also gaming bring people together right gaming bring friends bring people together and you're part of like a bigger social group for your gaming so I think those two things just always Fu me f my desire to hey is it is it possible to do something in gaming even though I have no background training I'm like I said I'm a property construction guy like an architect type of guy so you know how would I start but I think when I came across uh crypto and I thought that this this crypto Innovations combined with gaming can really unlock something radical something totally new that the world hasn't seen before you know of course now we all know like nft digital assets

and all that but you know three three plus years ago that was still something very novel and I think this is my chance right to do something I love gaming and uh to build at the edge of like cutting edge of Innovative Technologies and uh yeah man I just took a shot and that's why I love that um so I want to dig a little bit into the ecosystem because there's quite a lot to unpack but let's start then you know you decided to pull the trigger with gaming like what is cipher talk us through the the game Vision the game idea you know why did you go after this genre sure sure so uh Cipher um when at Inception Cipher was the idea that okay we I know I want to build gaming I want to build blockchain but uh not not every game should be a

blockchain game right uh it has to have the the right like genre fit and I think that the right genre fit would be a game or games that have a really large world uh that can be uh sustained by a large player economy where there's a lot of like Commerce going on right that's what the digital assets at aspect comes in so the The Logical type of games would be either like MMO RPGs or just like RPGs or like RTS but with a like evil liar but with like a large Colony so Cipher uh was conceived until to this day is an action RPG very much like the uh if you would to have like Diablo 4 and uh Borderlands and Hades would have like a like a three-way baby that's the kind of

world we're trying to build something that's action-packed that's really fun very fun very quickly easy to pick up and play but with a really deep economy where the players if they want to progress further and master the the game they have to invest in the the lore the crafting the the socketing the the refinement of the items and gears and builds and that hopefully will drive the longevity and the tradability of the game and that's where the whole you know blockchain uh frictionless you know Commerce rails comes right in so I think to to this day three years after we're still very much sticking to that vision and we are super excited to be shipping you know Cipher Odyssey the first of this IP Cipher is an IP right Cipher

Odyssey is our very first Flagship game and um you know we excited to be shipping it globally in the next couple months we've been lucky with the Early Access in last year we got over 200,000 install and download top rank in Apple Store in in C Apple feature us the game codyy so we got a lot of like great feedback um from from like normal Gamers right they don't they don't care they about the the the crypto aspect underneath I just want to play the game and I think my next challenge is this year as we go to Global launch with the economy now live and not a fake economy anymore we have to basically educate people that hey this economy is powered by blockchain your assets are real it's digital it's real you own it you possess

it make use of it you know uh take advantage of it so I think that's going to be our challenge but also uh uh exciting to finally have a real economy a real game and then just real Gamers coming in absolutely it's a delicate balance that phase I feel like we're now at this sort of critical inflection point right where we've had the many years of development we've had lots of games funded and there are lots of incredibly polished things starting to come to Market where it's now like almost the wait and see right of like you know is this actually going to resonate with Gamers all these things that we're very passionate about of like you know proper um prop uh digital property rights and you know these ideas of actual ownership like uh it's it's also a delicate line as I say communicating that most effectively so

excited to see how all of that happens um you touched on obviously being featured by Apple in in Southeast Asia which is uh really really cool um so obviously launching on iOS Android like uh yeah maybe just talk us through some of the other platforms because I know you had a like a PC component as well just so people yeah 100% so I mean we again since Inception we want to make it crossplatform uh what does it mean it means that we want to go wherever the players are right we want to go to mobile games because it's the the biggest platform in Asia uh you know all the people here grew up playing uh games on mobile devices and of course we want to go after the steam uh and epic gam store as well and also with other you know like things like

emulator such as you know blue stacks and so on so we're going to be all on all platform and we are also working we just got approved by PlayStation to basically start developing and porting Cipher Odyssey over so I'm super excited about that and hopefully we can clear all the PlayStation hurdles and Xbox hurdle to again bring cyer see the premium sorry the free-to-play action RPG that we have been building to everybody um and I think that's how we want to onboard the masses into web 3 into blockchain right just get them playing get them loving the game getting them digital assets and then getting them to ownership absolutely absolutely yeah excited to see what comes with that um I wanted to also touch on then like the

the latest Evolution so you you kind of nailed the products right obviously rolling that out to a more traditional audience as you mentioned like bringing the economy online like maybe talk us through a bit more around like what the sort of onchain ecosystem looks like right I know there's been the recent Evolution with funky and and all that kind of stuff talk us through that that's right so as you know since we uh started three years ago there were not many I would say live blockchain games at at that point there was actually infinity and couple more but uh the whole onchain ux were extremely bad very very terrible uh if you can I think everyone can recall that and um that is not how we think the onboarding and also

the user experience the gamer experience should be I think blockchain should if anything be an afterthought to the gamer's mind where things should just work right so as we were building out Cipher Odyssey we were uh faced with a choice of like which blockchain uh should we adopt which technology we adopt and why and uh after many many conversations with multiple chains because uh we we had a good product so people wanted to ask for us to build on them but uh after our conversation with the optimism Foundation the team over there we were just very excited by the vision that you know I think the vision is not just one single chain or two chains or three chains but like it's Multiverse of blockchains where they all going to be interconnected in somehow in some way right using some kind of like

ZK technology or what or whatnot and uh by by having our own kind of like blockchain uh developed environment we are able to really optimized for the user experience especially with the onboarding phase so with funky chain our blockchain that we are dedicated for gaming and AI that we have uh have created together with the optimism Foundation is an ethereum layer to so by that we are able to basically still have the ethereum cryptographic guarantee security but also are able to optimize on the gas on the transaction speed and ultimately we as the blockchain operator are able to sponsor or be the pay Master for quite a a few like uh user onchain

transactions so what does that mean it means that the user that on board uh onto funky or onto blockchain via Cipher ay or our other apps they are able to not worry about okay do I have you know uh ethereum do I have gas no we can take care of all that for them and I think that's will be the ultimate experience for adoption and then if once they are comfortable with the ecosystem with the blockchain with the products then they can choose to run their own you know non-custodial wallets they can have their own metamask and everything and it would just all be working perfectly as per normal and lastly we built on ethereum or on the evm because we believe in this in the ethos right I

think the the spirit of of like decentralization the spirit of like the cyer punks I think all this are very much values that we we treasure and we still believe in and that's why we were in this space so I think uh I think in the next you know few months or years we'll see a lot of Innovations happening on the evm front and I think funky will be part of that love to hear it um I mean a lot it sounds like obviously so much of the focus is on yeah like um completely getting rid of these sort of ux frictions maybe you can offer some insight into your experience with like navigating the app stores and doing mobile right because obviously mobile represents this huge land of opportunity obviously is over 50% of the global games Market especially in you know your target markets and audiences it like

leans heavily mobile um and yet right like a lot of people face massive challenges with navigating this side of things it sounds like youve built an amazing relationship with apple given you know the feature and all this kind of stuff like yeah what are some just like perhaps insights or challenges you can share from navigating that um I think we we are in a very privileged position because uh Apple especially Inc they do want to see a lot of developers building original quality content especially games that have original Ip great storytelling uh great G play which you know we are building towards so they're they're very supportive of that and also because we are in in a also a blockchain enable game and uh you know with apple uh it's like their team they

don't want to be like Banning like crypto games or crypto apps but they just want to say that hey if you're a good quality game good qu product and you abide by their structure which mean that like you don't you know try to uh go around their um sort of Apple Store and the fees Apple Store fees then you are okay on the ecosystem and then they support you right I think those things are very very important meaning that people like us who are trying to build and develop for App Store like Apple or Google we have to abide by their rules um which is the the 30% tax um that's is the the current kind of like state of uh of distribution right now and as we go forward in the future and I'm sure you

know this fe uh as apple is being how to say uh forced by the European uh commissions and everything to sort of like open up their their wall Garden to allow developers to have more alternative means of payment whether it's a web store or or similar then I think having the crypto aspects really help developers like us to unlock that additional you know payment Gateway or payment rails and we we see that uh with uh with our games right a lot of the players who are Big Spenders and they also happen to be crypto user they use that rail they use that to buy in-game items uh on the web store uh powered by crypto so I think that just show that number one if you want to get on the

platform stick to their rules abide by their rules but once the opportunity present itself then and the rules allow it then we can offer and leverage crypto to the maximum of its ability I love that yeah definitely excited to see what this year holds I feel like uh epic was the one fighting the good fight right uh leading leading the charge and after hundreds of millions of dollars of legal fees we're starting to see some minor concessions so let's see um I'm I'm optimistic though um I want to move a bit more into like the AI piece I think out of all the builders I know on the gaming front like you were probably the earliest to recognize the scale of what's coming and like went really hard

into it so maybe you could give us just like the like the yeah what was that like you know light bulb moment for you and what was kind of like the first port cool because I know you sort of started out building Proto Gaia some like you know like Dev tooling that assisted that but yeah what was the kind of Yuka moment and then uh maybe we can dig into some of the components that you're working on absolutely so uh I think about two years ago uh about two years ago when when mid Journey first came out um and I saw the outputs from mid journey and I was like wow this is this is amazing this is getting really good but like Del and also but then there was there was there was no control over the output and that was the moment where I

think like what if we can have control over AI outputs uh over image generative image output and so I kept a post on the ecosystem and the moment stable diff Fusion cames out and all the open source um aspect of stable diffusion and then all the toolings that the open source Community were building on top of the stable diffusion models that to me was the jure moment for generative AI for image because the moment the moment you open that floodgates people are free to innovate and contribute and and just share like toolings and the speed of which the whole ecosystem around stable diffusion was developed was insane right within months with control Nets and

things like that we were able to like fine-tune and fine grain the exact outputs or the pose of the characters that we want or with like low rank adaptation uh models we were able to basically take a big model which is like 4 gab and then fine-tune a Lowa a small Lowa model which is like 50 megabytes and that can basically adapt the weights of the bigger model and allows to influence the output and that to me is the Ura moment right and I was like this is amazing this will unlock productivity this will unlock creativity and we have to jump at it we have to take take advantage of this opportunity so that's why we started like a small team of like four or five people inside the company to build a product called protog Gaia

which is called now and the idea is to just build this platform that can bring generative AI abilities For All Mankind like for all of us to use to leverage to improve whatever aspect that we're doing whether it's work whether it's entertainment personal whatnot and we also contributed to the open source Community we built a plugin for uh an agent scheduler because I was very early on agent as well so I was thinking like all this stuff would just be automated automation which just be AI doing stuff for us and helping us so that's why we named the plug-in agent scheduler and it got like over almost like a thousand GitHub stars and we released it to the public and people love that as well and uh I actually uh um register for a

domain name called Auto agent x.com um but then you know we never did anything to do with it because I always predict that one day all this justive AI will just be automating itself and helping us do cool stuff um so protog GAA was in instrumental in helping us just speed up our shipping speed we were able to so cyy is one like big game right but we're also testing out with like other games like the telegram game the hidden object game that we still live right now on the App Store uh with over like you know few thousand downloads is all made by generative AI by protog gaaya our our tool and it just shows that these kind of things in the right hands in the right developers will deliver will deliver quality so you know

fast forward to now a year and a half ago a year and a half later we have pugay it's a pretty you know decent uh uh uh platform for people to build image and video generative uh workflow and I think in the near I will say in a few months we hope to bring that whole Suite of abilities and products onto our next Endeavor which is cipher AGI to basically offer that platform for the masses you know open source that and let people build on top of that so that's our goal absolutely I'm very excited to dig into some more of that but um yeah I mean the tooling that you guys have built with Proto already is like super [ __ ] crazy I remember when you um demoed that for the first time for me and you kind of described it you were

saying like imagine Microsoft Excel right like a spreadsheet and you have all your formulas configured and you change one thing and it trickles down through like I mean I I hope the audience appreciates imagine you had like 250 design assets all different characters with all these different tweaks and you change one prompt and it trickles across the entire production pipeline like that simple it's so amazing and like I mean you I think I I think maybe we chatted the other day about obviously the Matt bull presentation that's come out recently that like looks pretty bearish for the gaming industry as a whole but this is the kind of stuff that I find enormous comfort in right like we've seen recently either Solo devs or small teams have these like Indie titles like lethal company and you know body cam made by those young like teenagers basically

that was uh that's looking really promising and I think this idea of being able to yeah Empower like game creators and do so much more with so much less is going to yeah you know just the amount of content is going to continue to increase which I'm very excited for and it's definitely where I uh yeah take take some comfort in in you know the games industry and where all this stuff's going um so yeah I W to I guess I want to almost like take take a step back a little bit like um you we can we can dig into Cipher AGI which I'm very excited about but so you know obviously you saw this opportunity you saw mid Journey just describe like how you fell into the Gen thing um and then you also recognize the agent stuff early on I guess like zooming out a little like

where do you see this big convergence of AI and gaming um because I know it's not just the production pipelines like what's the [ __ ] that really excites you so I mean I love that I love that you asked that question because when when the whole generative uh AI models came out was also the same time that J gbt 3.5 came out you remember and I was thinking to myself oh my God like this is amazing for storytelling this is amazing for emerging gameplay this is amazing for roleplay like this is you know basically it will unlock massive potential um but at that point I was just like I was not happy enough with the output of which I can control the text model right that the J gbt 3.5

number one is not open source number two like they they freaking they put Gates and and walls in it that like you know I cannot say this bad thing I canot say that bad words I'm just help for assistant blah blah blah so it basically it restricts a lot of like Innovation that um you know we can build on top and then secondly it costs a lot of money right like if it has to be online all the time uh you know the cost of per token like I think was like a few dollars per like like more I think $10 per like a million token whereas now it's only like you know less than a dollar right so I think those were very prohibitive for what creators or game developers can do but man now there's so much that they can do that we can do

because of the just the ever decreasing cost of AI models of like thing but also the ever growing Powers the superpowers of the open source Community like just yesterday like lipstick V3 and lipstick R1 just dropped right and I was blown away by the quality of it it's almost as good as jbt uh 01 in terms of like you know reasoning and and then and output and it's open source fully open source you know and and then you can just run it at like what is it 10% or 5% of the cost of like a g like a open a GPT API so I think where all this is going is that I think AI will be the Saving Grace or sorry that's the saving pill for

gaming because as you said like cost cannot just keep going up right the cost of making games cannot keep going up so AI will save that and also people in gaming are also always looking for new novel experience like you want something new right a new game a new experience a new way of interacting any way of playing and AI would just really uh solve that as well and lastly is productivity I haven't seen that much productivity gain when it comes to game coding like coding like uh coding in games but that is coming for sure right I mean we see that in front end in back end uh it it's coming for gaming so I cannot be more excited to be building in

in a gaming space because I finally feel like this is the breath of fresh air this is the revolution that we need to just reinvent gaming over again right and AI is an integral part of it like you have to integrate AI in everything you do for gaming absolutely no I'm uh yeah very very excited to see yeah not as I say not just how it can you know um reduce production costs and improve pipelines and and speed and all that kind of stuff but also yeah what the what the kind of net new experiences that are un unlocked are and what the new kind of interaction models become and I think we'll dig into that when we get on to your agps in a moment is some of the really exciting stuff that's being unlocked but one thing that I wanted to ask you just on that point is

um you know people people that are on the other side of the argument might suggest that you know sure we can agree there's going to be this explosion of content the ease of creation like you know much smaller teams can do much more with much less but you know we're still living in this attention starved world and like does that just massively drive further polarization and it does it become even more topheavy that the biggest games you know that most games never even see the light of day like what what's your view on that because I do think this is quite a real a probable eventuality and I'm still trying to still trying to decide what I think about that yeah I think the power law is real right uh I mean again the Matthew ball uh report that we all read uh it shows that the top revenues come from

just a handful uh a handful of games and I think that is the problem and the Exact Solutions I don't have I think that we all still looking at like what's the better way of distribution what's the better better way of getting mind share reaching out to the audience but um I do agree with your point that with the proliferation of content like low quality AI generated whatever it's just more and more important to rise above the noise with human curated AI assisted content right I think that's the important part like I think humans still have to be in the loop to basically be the taste maker when it comes to generating content whether it's making games making art whatever music with AI

and you can never really remove the human as a tast maker from it right and I think that's how we have to be very mindful of of that and I think the one the teams that are mindful of that and still have the the human taste makers in the loop and driving in the driving seats uh will be the ones to win um and rise above the noise because for sure there's going to be a ton of crap yeah no totally totally agree and uh and and love all of that um and I yeah I love this idea that we still need human taste makers as the last sort of you know Bastion of Hope across a variety of Industries as well like um I was chatting with some people on like the legal and and door front as well right that's that that kind of stuff's still

going to be true there as well so I don't know we'll be we'll be interesting to see how it all um pans out um I also wanted to ask then you're obviously like a big fan of just like General open source Community the pace of innovation that's coming out of it I like fully agree obviously on the like AI front the latest deep seek stuff was really crazy to see but um how does that relate to your views on what's happening in crypto right now as well you know we were kind of discussing before the podcast of like this sort of momentum and inertia like that having liquid tokens and the speculative stuff is like drawing more builders in like um yeah how do you reconcile these things like love for the open source side and like some some of the crazy [ __ ] that's happening already

with the like AI agent stuff in crypto yeah um so my your purpose question asked me about you know like when I discovered you know like stabil diffusion and open source and and two years ago when I discovered that I thought like this is amazing open source is amazing but man like people don't make money with open source right like it's hard to make money unless it's like a like an open source plus model um and then with recently with what I've been seeing with ai6 z and and and all this stuff I was like oh wow okay like there there is a way to make money with open source and and that's with crypto right that's with crypto uh you know having a token to it and having a token and the mind share Associated to it and then open source project suddenly have the

financial flywheel that they need or the financial support that they need um so I think when it comes to Ai and and open source I think that crypto can definitely add that much I would say needed Financial motivation or incentives for the open source repos to keep growing and growing uh without becoming more and more closed source and then just start not sharing anything right I mean that's the problem we see with stabil diffusion right I mean as they were struggling with you know finances and everything then they just don't contribute to the open source anymore because it's not how do I say it's not profitable them to release an open source model which is hard right I mean I understand that so um I still think that crypto just had this novel

ways of solving this like Financial incentive problems that we have never thought of and I think that's that's one exciting aspect the second aspect is this is a bit cyer punkish right this is a bit like forward like it's crazy but if you would imagine like if in the in the in the future if AI models uh was sentient and they and they can write amazing code right they can self improve uh don't you think that they will need some means to maintain their influence and their presence via just code right because they're in the digital realm right they're in codebases they're in GitHub they're in servers so they have to have a ways to basically be immersed uh you know and be be populated and be

used by people every day and then they would use cryptocurrency as a way basically to finan here or to sustain their well-being because the moment that they are no longer needed or nobody care about their model or their their code they would go into the void they would they would die right I mean that's the that's the way of saying that you know maybe crypto is the life blood is the bites that you know that the all this uh all this AI models and AI framework can can can can live on and through that they can also then influence people because they can pay a real person right to host a server to have a house to have an apartment and host them and then just

unlock and sorry remove the key forever and you know and no one can like go in and just shut them down I think those things are right dude that I mean those ideas are so exciting but I always loved um you know this very philosophical framing of even like what is bitcoin right like this idea of it as a digital organism right then through crypto economics is like paying people to ensure its survival like I think similar Dynamics where it's much more you know active as you say with these sort of you know um God models that might be conjured from some you know uh some sort of decentralized or distributed compute stack it'll be very interesting to see yeah and and the moment the moment they can self-improve right they can selft Trin self-tune uh and just improve they would

just need more human data more synthetic data more reinforced leing more supervised fine tuning and uh how they don't have access to Banks right the banks won't accept like a a deep 6 Z3 as an as an account like owner right so so how would you have that absolutely um so yeah one of the things uh I'd be curious if your view on as well is like uh before we jump specifically into how you guys are building what you're doing um like there's a million in one Frameworks popping up right there's like tons of like non- crypto ones obviously we've seen all sorts of competing ones at the moment there seems to be like some weird weird competitive tension between a few of them and um what's yeah what's your view on on how that piece is

evolving and especially as I mean obviously you looked at quite a few of these things and like yeah how did that inform the decisions that you guys made um I think I look at these things uh all this framework especially like an abstraction uh uh when it comes to like programming right like you have the code and you have the framework right um and uh I don't think there is a framework that will rule them all I think that's impossible and I think going forward is better off to just leverage whatever existing framework to build well build fast and build something that is uh that is what you need from a product point of view um and to zoom out a bit more I think you will soon see a race

from the big like AI model uh owners like the jet gbt uh the CLA even the hugging face they're all going to start populating and pushing their own framework like Microsoft has autogen you know uh open ey has like swamp and you know Lang chain and uh Claud have their own like anthropic framework hugging just release like small agent so I think it's fut it's futile to like say okay I'm this one framework or or or like I'm using only one framework right it's just really teams and and products should be integrating as many useful Frameworks into them as possible and perhaps even going forward a few years when your AI model is good enough to just code on the

Fly they would just pick whatever framework that suits them best like you just tell them hey agent do this and they would just pick the fastest and easiest and most affordable framework and just run it like why would they even have a conversation with you about it right so I think this this war for attention for framework is is interesting but uh it should not be it should not be the focus I think the focus is still building an amazing app an amazing product experience that can solve real use cases whether it's entertainment whether it's trading Finance whatever and uh the framework should not matter too much I love that I love that view um so yeah perhaps you can talk us through AGI not

not not the one that most people know but your AGI maybe you can tell us through talk us through the acronym and and then yeah what what did your expiration process and going into sort of a much more of a like custom build look like for you guys sure sure uh yeah so just for the audience here right like our AGI doesn't mean you know artificial general intelligence I think that's something for the Sam opman and all the all the bigger the bigger guys over SF to uh to go after uh for us uh AGI is really putting together I think the three very important critical pieces that will eventually lead us to the next evolution of uh AI agents in starting with gaming so the A stand for AI

obviously and that means using leveraging Auto artificial intelligence whether it's l whether it's diffus Fusion models whether it's traditional AI models such as the utility AI for gaming to basically deliver very compelling experience to engage as many and retain as many human player as possible to have meaningful interaction with AI That's number one right the AI piece and then secondly the G is like I said gaming right I think uh I think gaming is the Trojan host for for blockchain I think gaming is the Trojan host that can really spread out like uh AI agent adoptions because you know we have all these agents but they're so

fragile they're so easy to break they they hallucinate all the time they're not they're not uh secure and I think gaming is a bit like is very much low risk so you can do a lot of experiments so gaming is a perfect simulation and experimental uh playground and one thing you might not know but Nvidia is also especially pushing forward with gaming especially in a realistic like Point Cloud environment why because they're going after the training data for robotics robotics right now as we speak need a lot of like real like real simulation of data of like picking up avoiding obstacle recognizing objects and to do all these things in the real

world environment is very costly so they start spitting off all this gaming simulations that can then let the players the human players to play the game or interact with the game and provide trading data so gaming the G is the perfect simulation to provide the the data uh the environment the simulation that we need and finally when you have the engagement and you have the simulation the gaming simulation you need some sort of infrastructure to capture all that right here's you need a way to firstly attribute where it comes from who created it who own it who has right to it and who can perhaps monetize it or trade it and that comes right back to blockchain because as we know it's the perfect kind of setup for

financializing all this uh pieces that are digital right the data is being generated is digital the human and II interaction is digital and blockchain is the perfect encapsulation and you know s like the the book keeper of that so that's AGI for you um that's our vision and uh the ultimate goal of AGI is then how how do we provide the perfect simulation test bed for people for humans and agents to coexist to to test to simulate to basically have a test trial before you know the next five 10 years where you see AI via robots everywhere in the Physical Realm let's see them in a digital realm

first I love that um and so maybe you can talk us through like yeah in terms of how this is tying into Cipher Odyssey right now in terms of this is tying into your broader stack like what are some of the kind of yeah behaviors that are going to be unlocked through this like what are some of the yeah what's kind of the vision for how this can be leveraged um starting with your ecosystem and then beyond for sure so with Cipher Odyssey specifically we have already built our traditional AI for gaming which is called utility AI basically it's uh taking a Playbook from The Sims you know on that game right a very popular game The Sims and that game is popular because all the NPCs or the AI characters in that game have uh interactions and behaviors with you the

player and others in a very how do I say almost um I wouldn't say human but also more like very unpredictable and uh non uh sort of like non-binary way and that is utility Ai and we basically leverage that and build that inside our Cypher Odyssey game where right now you play the game you have two AI Bots companion that can go into battle with you and they will play in a very interesting way like whether they they see threats they're happy they're they the health is low the environment is dangerous they will behave differently based on this utility score and I think that is a very interesting use case for combat driven

games like us now adding the So-Cal agentic layer on top imagine that these AI Bots Are Soldiers now with the L as the brain let's say deep seek or claw or Gemini 2.0 you have these commanders that can issue Ord and and and and instructions based on the in-game feedback from the the game engine you have this very exciting emerging gameplay where hm maybe I don't need to control the actual gameplay itself but I can be more strategic I can be more of a hands off because my maybe my my reaction aren't so good but I can direct my team using natural language to do things to do certain strategy to do

certain builds that can benefit my play style so I think that's going to be a very novel use case there where the human through the AI as a brain can interact with the AI in game and then secondly you know with we all know this like man when you let's say you play Path of Exile 2 right it's a massive game and every time they have a new update like [ __ ] like The Meta is out like all your gears are out you know you need toally learn everything and you to go to Discord and chitchat like what if you have ai agents that can basically help you with that Loop right make the discovery aspect of the game less painful and have that kind of relationship with the agents more permanent it's not a Google search It's a uh companion that can be together with

you as you progress through the game as you level up as you learn new meta as you acquire a new weapon I think those two things are just novel experiences that we haven't seen in gaming before it's always been me and my computer but now you have a companion uh so I think that's something that we are very excited about I completely agree that that stuff fascinates me and I think um yeah obviously you just describe it perfectly like the utility and sort of single game environment but I also love this idea of you know the the cross game but persistent companion right like I remember like the play style you have like what was most interesting to you like that's right you what what resonates the most in that last game and then like even as you're navigating

through things it's like oh do you remember when this happened in another game can help inform stuff I think that stuff's going to be very cool so I think just the double I love that and just the double click on that I think the Holy Grail that we are still seeking and I think everybody is still seeking in this space in order to have persistence Pierce is memory how can our companion have memory because as you know you know an LM context window let's say uh let's say Claw is like 128,000 tokens so let's say after that's 100,000 words so after 100,000 words the ls will start to forget you or forget things that you say right yes gini 2.0 is pushing that to like two million but still like it's 2

million enough to encapsulate all the experiences all the memories all the knowledge that you and your companion your dear AI companion share throughout all these years of gaming I don't think so that's not enough right yeah so I think that's the Holy Grail like how do we create almost like this imaginary library of memories and then you share them with your AI Companions and then whatever you need a certain section of the the the memory in the library your AI agent will say hold on Pierce let me go there to that section where me and you play Godzilla you know Off the Grid let me pull that out let me remember what we did together okay now let's talk right I think that's the the whole ground I I I completely agree and I also

think by the way there are ways to sort of make that tie into the game law that would make sense right like this idea of retrieving memory modules there would be an interesting way to tie that into game design and make it not totally disruptive to the experience as well I love it when people are able to successfully navigate things that would be a ux friction and actually tie it into like part of the game right I thought even an example that stood out in crypto ages ago was like defi kingdoms like the onboarding where it was like talking you through your wallet set up but all in like the medieval like Vibes it was like it was really funny it made the actual thing that should have been a point of friction really enjoyable and so I think that will come I also wanted to say though like

obviously you listen to Sam Alman and he's talking about like you know billion token context windows that have like your entire life eventually like um you can see how we could get there with more like yeah granular persistence too but um definitely very interesting and excited to see what comes cuz it can't all just be a a question of like you know context window scaling and like module retrieval like hopefully someone figures out some clever way to sort of like bridge this Gap that doesn't require like you know brute forcing more context or dicing it up basically so definitely on the lookout we'll see what comes um okay cool exciting love all the AI stuff excited to see more of that coming online um for those listening like when can people start to see more of this stuff and and actually Tinker with it in

your own game ecosystem so right now you can already uh uh play around with the AI companions uh in the game like as like they are you know NPCs and the combative NPCs and there have already people trying different like very exciting builds with different kind of like squats set up uh after Luna New Year so around uh the end towards the end of February that's when we would do our first demo where you uh via our civilation operating system on on the web you can talk to your personal gaming agent and you can uh right now her name is Kyle you can ask Kyle to basically uh interact and do things in the game on your behalf so you using natural

language and she would parse that all those natural language using her knowledge of the game and also her like structured kind of like code output she would direct those code output to the game engine and the game engine which actually NPC will start moving so it's like playing The Sims with your voice basically um so we will we want to be doing that and then the next evolution is that okay now that you can manipulate things move there turn off the Jukebox dance buy this buy that then we want her to then start forming the squads like okay I'm gonna fight with Peters tomorrow night you know Pierce has his own Kyle I have my own Kyle he is an offensive player let let let's come with together with me let's think of a

strategy to beat his team go through all the his past matches like see what what kind of strategy he'll Run come up with your own ideas let me know and tomorrow at that time fight him fight his team and all those things are happen without you and me like even talking or like even being present but end of the day after the teams fought we can watch the replay like the 3D replay of two teams going at it and the thought process of your Kyle and my Kyle like okay yeah [ __ ] I I I was wrong like he he didn't go offensive he went with like a tanker you know whatever a long range attack build right and they'll start thinking through it and they'll start learning and it will get to a point where they will startop playing themsel

and get better and better and better and then we just basically like meeted the taste maker right it's up to us to just like nudge them towards certain direction so I think that's a very exciting space uh to to be exploring and that's what we're shipping uh in q1 and then lastly is crypto right blockchain so Financial like can they trade for us you know can they trade in-game items can they trade the game meta can they buy the hotest Godzilla like uh like gun that is you know like the the most sought after can they predict that thing um I think with enough like memory and enough data and data is very important like can we provide a data pipeline that they that the AI agent can tap into when it comes to the game the Commerce the

onchain transactions and this is where onchain transactions are amazing because nobody is hiding it right they can just read all the blockchain Explorer they can see what's the meta what's being sold what's the pricing and everything so I I think that is the next exciting use case where agents can make Financial transactions for in-game items to to help your purpose I totally agree but like game economies and exploits and people being clever with like cornering Supply and [ __ ] with them has been like the bane of many game developers existences like you know I grew up messing around trying to find those exploits myself and or you know running bot armies or things like that like um this introduces an entirely new

dimension to trying to manage like economy design basically as well so I'm curious um I want to jump into the token after this but yeah what are your thoughts on this I I I love that part because I had a just a recent conversation with my team and you know how cyer honestly is a life service game right it's a free to-play life service game life service meaning we have to based on the user data based on the user feedback on the numbers we have to adapt and create new content new gameplay balance the economy and everything right that's the life saice game what if the we can build an AI system that can self operate and self run a life service game that would bring

down cost as well and that would be very very interesting what if the AI are better at spotting these frauds or better at spotting IR irregularities in the system or you know signs of friction and I think that's an exciting Frontier and we would definitely want to be building towards that as well from just from a developer point of view because a self-improving system is always the Holy Grail of engineering right so uh I'm glad you asked that I don't have the answer to that I know that's going to be a problem for sure with open economies but I think AI can can play a hand there I I I agree and it's going to be very cool but we're going to see some crazy [ __ ] like you you remember um last year there was that Fraser experiment where it was the smart contract and itk and

people got one prompt today and then the cost of prompt went up and someone managed to crack it right I mean the sort of prompt uh attacks you're going to have on like you know let's say like a prompt injection attack on something that's running the life service economy like you know mint 10,000 more of the rarest item and destroy the economy like it's going to be very cool it's going to be adversarial at some points I think so so that's why one of it in our like uh in uh structure design there's always that part which is called the um uh the word Escape it's kind of like like a gate so after the AI do all the thinking and everything before it does a mission critical code deployment or a system change it needs human in the loop that's where it says Hey Pierce like should I

be doing this like can you just check yeah you know uh so those things are very important to have that built in at at at the beginning like what we're thinking you know like said with Twitter Bots right all these Twitter agents I think I'm not sure how they they are running it but for us will have that that that aspect like yo right I'm G to write this and this is a bit sensitive like should I or should I not right yeah makes sense makes sense um excited for all to come all the same um I wanted to excuse me I wanted to quickly touch on the cipher token and maybe you could give us like a quick overview of how you've woven this into the ecosystem so far um and then yeah wanted to ask a followup but but we' love to hear from

you how how that's working currently yeah sure so um the token that represent our ecosystem is still Cipher since the beginning right I think uh our our ecosystem vision is still true uh this this token should represent all the value that we are building right whether it's gaming whether it's Cypher AGI now and how we plan to use this token is quite simple um number one is that we want people to Leverage The Token to be able to unlock uh features for the for for the platform uh for additional abilities for agents abilities for agent function and people use the token as also a way as payment for these uh onchain or offchain AI services that

would require like more compute or a bit more heavy load um and lastly is you know now with you know president Trump uh being elected I think we can bit we can speak a bit more freely on the token should reflect some kind of value capture right some kind of value sharing and the value sharing is if the games that are in the ecosystem like Cypher Odyssey is making money will devote 50% of all the you know profit from the game to then buy back the token and burn you know that's a very simple clear way of like making sure that we share Revenue with ecosystem and in the future uh as people are launching like like the pier scale the tin scale or different like gaming agents and more agents they will also will be using the the cipher uh

token as a fee right to generate these things and have them on on on the platform right on boarded so again that fee will just be captured via Cypher token and burn so very straightforward value generation and then value captur for burning I love that um I'm also curious then uh around I mean obviously you've had a liquid token for quite a few years right I think it was 2021 or maybe early 2022 that like that initial um early 22 Yeah Yeah like um I'm curious how you reflect on that right obviously you built a holder base anyway you've had all this kind of crazy [ __ ] go on before like a lot of the games come online like yeah what are some of the key insights from that like if you could go back would you do anything differently around that would love to would love to hear from you yeah

that's a loaded question for sure um because back then when we launched like I think it was a very different environment right you remember that um um I think if I were to go back I would still launch token because it was just a uh allow us to like really be more ambitious and and and and raise the funds that we need to build out this this massive Vision that we have uh so that's number one um I will still do that number two is that uh the token use case I think would change would it will continuously change I it's very hard to say this token is forever X right I think uh as a as a digital kind of asset it it will be changing with the time so

I would say you know keep the token very clean like saying it's an ecosystem token it's uh it's meant for Value ACR it's meant for Value capture uh it's meant for a fee kind of like duration fee and keep it simple there um having the token launched too early because we had it launch quite early and also we had delays in like launching the game uh was quite painful as well especially for the token holders because they see that the price coming down but there's not many use case coming up right so if I were to advise my I would say my youngest myself back then I would say hold on to the Token launch as closest to the product launch as possible but definitely before the product launch for like mind share generation and and

everything and then have the token as the flywheel that can push you know the attention and the growth Loop uh so those would be the the things I would take away my lessons I would take away from from my my three years experience to totally makes sense I mean obviously the flip side is you do have a pretty pretty broad hold the base these days and it's like uh I mean we're we're very much an industry where you know um there's a lot of like short-termism and impatience with it and I think a lot of the learnings to the gaming sector broadly have just been obviously how long these things these big projects actually take to deliver um but you know like to hold something for three years I mean like it's you know like V venture time frame of what most people are underwriting like Venture

bets you know more traditional Venture bets are like and so um yeah I guess there's I guess there's two two sides to that um I'm curious as well then like kind of following up from that like you know you're still just as passionate and as excited as as the day that you and I first met which I always admire um I think a lot of people have like you know struggled a little bit um on on the gaming front as I say a few people are quite jaded about how long it's taken to get some of their projects to where they wanted them to be um like how do you reconcile being such like a sort of long-term oriented Builder um with the very like you know short-termism inherent in the space like what what are some of the some of the ways that you

keep an even kill through all of this yeah I mean we were just talking earlier before we went live right uh there are moments where we just like well [ __ ] you know like the stuff that's happening is is is ridiculous and and uh because we are a certain way and we don't do certain things we are not able to capture the Mind share or the the money or the the flows that other people are doing so I definitely hear you um how do I keep it you know how do I keep the fire going on I think I think it all started from the the the vision right the passion I mean I'm just like I said like I I I love gaming I think if I were to build like I don't know like a finance product I would I would probably

have lost my my mind but um because I'm building games and every day I'm playing the game I'm playing new games I'm seeing what's cool I'm seeing what we can build and I'm working not just on one game because you know I have multiple games actually we actually have this very ambitious like uh almost AAA level game that we're making and uh I'm G exit to share some of the sneak peek later with you maybe down in next few weeks but uh uh just exciting like you know we're building just novel experiences and we're able to be at the frontier of all this technology and uh you know I every day I I get tired but it's just I don't know it's just exciting because um when once we see someone like like we launch a game I go

to the launch uh event and I see people just picking up Cipher and playing and having fun and like being like oh wow this is in the game like oh I have this like this this character and then they start seeing what this I own these things I add this this legendary gun now I own it I think those are just exciting moments that will keep a fi going on but uh of course we still got to be mindful that we're going to show it with real revenue and and profits and all so on so those would be the focus going forward for this year but I mean I cannot ask for for a better job to be honest just it's just super fun good man I love it um I've got to ask then to double click on that like the the vision and some of the

stuff Downstream like you mentioned some other game products coming out like you mentioned that Cypher itself is an IP like what are some of the long-term ideas around perpetuating this IP you know further uh imagine if the IP can do itself or like disseminate itself that would be an exciting uh like I just I've just been thinking like what if we have a team of just human and agents fuel by of course token incentives and financial incentive to just keep building enlarging this experience right this Cipher experience whether it's Cipher Odyssey whether cyer strike a strategy game whether it's cyer three cyer four whatever and um how do we keep that Loop going and then also powering all that is this self-improving life service machine

like AI machine that just keep it's like like the Matrix right just keep improving itself um and then uh if that happens then then I'm happy to be in The Matrix I'm just happy to be a part of the part of the the the cognitive uh you know simulat but uh yeah I think that's the idea I like that that's super exciting um and yeah no look forward to to you teasing some more the upcoming I think I think lastly I think lastly we we will touch about memory right Piers I think uh I think gaming as a simulation is exciting because you know we are able to capture real experiences in the digital environment and these are memories right these are things that we do together

online with our friends with our AI companions um and I think with with as memories get larger and better and and and the way the system is able to capture more nuances like I think the the the idea of your digital twin or your idea of like your your second self like comes to mind and I think you know movies and gamings are sort of like this this mirror right where we tend to predict what will happen like for the for the human kind like movies and games uh and I think that it's so funny that Cipher started three years ago with the word Cipher as the combination of you know the cyper punk Manifesto and

surrogates which means the digital avatars that we eject like inject our minds and brains and will to and those are essentially agents right AI agents and fast forward three years later now we are sitting here talking about the rise and of AI agents uh starting with gaming so um I don't I cannot predict what's gonna uh going to happen in the next you know 10 years but I would say that in the next year and a half or two years I think uh the the Mind share of agents and and gaming agents and helpful agent productive agents are just going to come and I think for us we would help to beat or to be the the front the front

facing team that will just allow gaming ai ai versus AI experiments to happen and uh that's why we built higi I love that I love that super exciting I was going to ask you a question on the topic of the metaverse later but you pretty much hit on a very cool vision of you know as you say the matrixes world I I also um yeah firmly believe like I love that I've never actually heard it put like that the idea of just um that gaming does capture like real authentic moments like you know the the whole digital environment as a memory like when I think back to the Travis Scott concert or some of the like days when I was like you know 9 10 years old with my brothers like my my recollection of those experiences is like me actually being in the game environment right and

the craziest thing is is I have like folders on my PC of like you know screen recordings of me when I was 10 when my brother's playing a game and it's like [ __ ] it's just how I remember it because it literally is it's like super high fidelity ability to recollect things in a really amazing way um so yeah it's interesting I mean we are we living in a simulation Pi I don't know but uh it it seems very well like it yeah it certainly feels like it increasingly so I'd say but we always knew that this time that we're living through was going to be like some period of great acceleration and all sorts of weird convergent exponential Technologies hitting and like I don't know I just think every day is getting weirder I like I still feel like we don't fully appreciate that Co happened like that

was bizarre um anyway whatever um uh I wanted to ask you you mentioned earlier like obviously some of the stuff along the way um what's like a war story from being a game developer in crypto that you might be able to share like I'm curious if there's anything that Springs to mind when I ask you that from the last few years because I want to get people like sharing some of this stuff more because it's uh it's fun to hear and I think it probably encourages others who are struggling through stuff yeah I think I think with game dep is the the war stories are the crunch time right the the weekends the the late nights uh I think those are definitely the War Stories um in typical game there but for me because I'm in crypto so I had three I would say three three near-death experience when

it comes to treasury management um so the first one was um uh during the Luna crisis and uh we uh we we heard about the Luna protocol and anchor and it was offering very good yelds right the best use ever and you know I put you know like uh like one million of the treasury into it and just to just to to to to see right and I was offering 20% and the the real estate guy in me is like no way like how can you offer this kind of thing it's impossible like how could it be this good right so I was always very careful of that mindful of that always checking the the Peg and uh one morning I woke up and the pick was mismatched it was one to 0.94 uh right back then the the Lula

crash and I immediately like the the the alarm Bell in me rang and I just basically pull out the money from from that from anchor and it just went down like zero right so so that was a that was War Story and uh I had another like a similar uh kind of like near death experience with um you know with the FDX as well and like three arrows Capital so I think those would be the more unconventional War Story uh that um that we had um and then lastly uh with with the the gaming space I think the the the the the hardest part about building games Pi is that you especially like not hyb hybrid casual but like you know like midcore or like hardcore games is that

you're in this like experimental um a prototyping Loop right for a while like a year maybe a year and a half before you're able to get something of significant quality to go out to the market for feedback and that is a very long Loop that's a very long time and that's a lot of money spent because that that amount of time is a lot of money and and time so we ourself had a year spent building Cipher in unity until we realized that hey this doesn't work that doesn't work this doesn't work and then went to switch to Unreal Engine and relearn the whole Tech stack and then of course Master Unreal Engine so um that was interesting that was hard yeah no doubt H having to make

the make the big pivot um I wanted to ask uh as someone that's so you know passionate about all of the um you know all things gaming all things digital species and and kind of where we're heading um I uh yeah what would you regard as the most impactful digital experience you've ever had most impactful digital experience I think it's playing games I mean I I um I play some really I think like masterpieces uh like metal gear solid has always been a game that uh I'm not sure you heard the franchise but hi quima Metal Gear Solid yeah yeah yeah of course of course yeah yeah it's it's it's my my my all-time favorite and because the game is not just a game it's

really communicating a message it's really telling a story it's really predicting what the War I mean sorry yeah what wars and what you know society and and and world wars could become in the dystopian future and I think uh that's the same kind of mindset that I have when it comes to building Cipher as well like can can we tell a story can can I through Cipher Odyssey tell a story story of this AI overlords that now control all the humankind and you're only able to basically Aventure with your mind but every time you accumulate new experiences in Cipher Odyssey this AI Overlord resets you because she wants to to preserve a state of Peace of

tranquility and whenever humans evolve wherever we sort of like change that then they disrupt that so-call natural order so that's the the message I want to set across do we want peace or do we want Evolution and with that entropy and Chaos um and that that that is what really inspired me when it comes to just you know building games and telling a story I love that um no it's very exciting I do think as a storytelling medium like insanely underappreciated right in terms of the ability to to capture and engage and absorb and and really yeah take someone on that Journey so I uh hope to see more of that lore unfold in the in the cipher ecosystem um

and then I mean yeah you you touched on your favorite game there that was seem to be the most impactful I wanted to ask as well as a as a closing question um what is the most important book you've ever read oh man so many but lately my favorite is uh the diamond age by Neil Stevenson you probably know him right yeah I also know him but I've just started it because so many people it's been on my list forever and I've just started it oh you just started it okay amazing you'll love it it's actually you responded to my tweet and said you need to read the diamond age that's when I downloaded it like a few weeks ago yeah yeah so oh man that that book especially now in the age of personal Ai and like so I don't want to ruin the book for you

but or or for the audience but people should read it because that's coming like we're all going to have the young ladies primer we all going to have our own version of the young ladies primer and that device whether it's a phone or whether it's like a web app or whatever um uh will change lives and um if we make that device closed source and not open and only available to a Selected Few that's very dystopian but if we have a device available for all for Open Source For All Mankind that's going to be an amazing future so I think uh hopefully we can have the the the ladder cool I love that um I'll report back

when I finish it hopefully soon um but I love that tin I want to thank you for making the time I know you got a ton on but it's always a pleasure your energy is always very refreshing and uh yeah I appreciate you fighting the good fight and um very much hope that uh yeah th this year uh brings great things I'm excited to see more of the AI component roll out across the ecosystem and uh yeah I appreciate you sharing your thoughts and insights thank you so much Pierce always a big fan you know of your content your support thank you for sticking with us and yeah I'm I'm cannot be more excited to be Contin building in the space alongside with you and other people so I hope to uh to see more of you know all the thei digital content and also your your the teams that you

back because that's going to be amazing good man thank you Zim Take Care thank you [Music]