GamesBeat: I don’t think anybody’s gotten to what this means for games yet. SpyParty is a perfect platform to do this kind of thing. But this feels big enough that I should learn this stuff. The GPU prices went through the roof, but nobody does real mining on graphics processing units (GPUs). All of Google’s stuff apparently runs on that.

Hecker: Then there’s these that are custom coded for it. They show a CPU recognizing flowers, which is pretty slow, and then they turn on the GPU. GamesBeat: Nvidia shows that video about flower recognition. Now there’s so many positive feedback loops that you get a Facebook and you get a Google. There’d be a big one and a couple of runners-up. It used to be, if you went to a small town, there would be three stores that sold the same kinds of things, and fourth store would struggle, but you could have a top three. That’s why I get a little creeped out by every time there’s one of those Captcha things on a website. We just didn’t have a billion images to train it on. It’s the same neural net tech from the ‘90s. A lot of what happened was, now we just have so much data.

He saw that transition, and I was talking to him a lot about what happened and what it felt like. He started his image processing PhD when it was like, “Now I’ll write the code to find the mustache.” By the end of his PhD, because it takes six years, you just throw all this data at the thing and something pops out. I was at Foo Camp a couple years ago, and I was talking to a guy who was-I can’t remember the name of the package, but he was at Cal, working on one of the big open source packages. The deep learning stuff went from basically not working at all to, “Now I can talk into my phone and a text message comes out.” Something happened in there. Hecker: Well, I specifically mean the deep learning kind of AI. GamesBeat: You would think that you had AI as an idea in this game from way back. GamesBeat: How are you feeling about this?Ĭhris Hecker: In some ways, I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time on this, and in the meantime things like artificial intelligence have become so big.

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