(tl;dr: video at the bottom of D&D-like game using an LLM)
I drive my kids to school almost every morning. There is a phrase that my son will speak that simultaneously brings utter dread and euphoric joy to me during those twenty minutes: "Dad, want to play D&D?" I love that phrase because I love interacting with my son when he is being creative and problem solving, there is no better way to experience your kids. And, I hate it because when I'm driving and he asks me to be DM, my brain melts the entire way as I'm trying to navigate aggressive drivers, school schedules AND at the same time build an entire world from scratch.
I've been fascinated with AI and dungeons and dragons ever since AI Dungeon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Dungeon) in 2019. The creator Nick Walton, played D&D for the first time and then this led him to wonder if an AI could function as a dungeon master. If I think back, that was the first time I thought AI could be interesting (my CS degree at University of Washington occurred during one of the AI winter conversations).
In the last year, AI has radically changed in two important ways. First, the generative capabilities of AI have become so exciting and accessible. But, second, and more importantly. we now have open source and freely available models that permit you to build what you want entirely without the constraints of commercial companies. I'm sure those two things did not occur in isolation.
A few months ago, LLaMA was released by Facebook. A short while later the llama.cpp project was released. Vicuna runs on a low-end GPU machine (only 6 GB). It is amazing to see that the token generation is only about 300ms, which is tolerable for interaction with a human. That's mind boggling.
It didn't take much to cobble together a NodeJS script that captures those tokens and sends it to simple real-time database. And, then not much further for a Svelte app that subscribes to that real-time database, gets the tokens, and then reads them back using the Text to Speech capabilities. Android permits you to choose the text to speech voice, and the project even speaks in a British accent. Despite not being allowed to watch TikTok, even my kids have adopted that weird tic where they keep saying "I'm Brit-tish", so they enjoy the English acccent.
This morning I introduced my kids to the project. I set it up poorly, saying I had a surprise for them in the car. My middle daughter could not stand the secret, so she pried it from me. When she heard it was D&D, she got super negative. I was consumed by anxiety, thinking that my son's standards for game play is so informed by billion dollar companies like Minecraft (M$), Roblox and Steam. I was sure they would hate it.
But, then we got in the car, and I showed them the first screen where they had to choose between desert, ocean and forest adventure. They chose one, and they were captivated.
There were so many great conversations in that ride: they don't yet realize that this AI isn't sentient. And, it is very alpha, and we discussed that the ai gets things wrong. Why did it generate a url and put that into the chat! It was so much fun to have them play a game and discuss mathematics and probability and programming.
I'm interested in building a small intentional community of people who want to continue this work. Join me! More details here: https://katarismo.com/
This short video shows a little about the experience.
