AI Prize Fight founders share bold vision for future of esports YouTube: 6079aiA group of AI \u2018free thinkers\u2019 are hosting a bot-vs-bot tournament in Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. I met with the minds behind the event to understand why they put together such an unorthodox fighting game tournament and what their goals are in the esports scene. In May 2024, \u201cthought leaders\u201d in the independent AI space revealed they\u2019d be hosting \u2018AI Prize Fight,\u2019 a tournament series where tech enthusiasts and fighting game fans can join a dojo and create an AI \u2018agent\u2019 to battle it out on their behalf in a game of Street Fighter. With $15K in prizes on the line, the event has already seen a good amount of excitement on social media\u2026 but I wasn\u2019t convinced. I had to know more, especially given their claims of hoping to \u201cchange the landscape\u201d of esports with this new initiative. Given that the fighting game community is founded on competition between human opponents, I found it odd that leaders in the AI space would seek to change such a vibrant community in such a major way, and doubted that the FGC would buy whatever they were trying to sell. I got to speak with Mike Anderson and Jesse Bryan, the organizers of the event and figureheads of 6079, an independent AI group, about their goals for the tournament and what they hope to achieve in esports. It turns out that they aren\u2019t actually trying to replace fighting game pros with AI-powered bots\u2026 but they do believe that this initiative could, and likely will, bring about a new genre of competitive gaming altogether. \u201cThese emerging AI artists, if you dig into their backgrounds, most of them didn\u2019t go to fine art schools and things like that. They were like, \u2018I could almost think my way to these amazing designs.\u2019 It\u2019s a different kind of competition,\u201d Bryan told me. \u201cExactly in the same way that people will talk about AI art, I think it\u2019s gonna be the same type of thing. It\u2019s like, I do esports, but I\u2019m on the AI side. Almost like BattleBots, where you have to think about your battle bot before it goes to battle and build it, and then you put it in an arena and see what happens. Businesses are gonna need prompt engineers. In the same way as in the past, you needed engineers to build software, now, you\u2019re going to need prompt engineers.\u201d Bryan foresees a future where a new type of gaming competition will emerge \u2014 one where players build out AI \u201cagents\u201d using a series of prompts. Rather than being based on reaction times and perfect inputs, this type of esport will reward the person who can make the best prompt\u2026 although it\u2019s unclear how high that particular skill ceiling will go. In fact, he claims that there\u2019s a future where players will create agents to play a game for them, even throwing around the idea that esports pros might create their own AI agents based on themselves, which they could then trademark and sell to further boost their income. \u201cThis is a way to try to show people that this is possible. The cool thing is that we\u2019re using Street Fighter as a framework for this, but you could use any game and put it on top of it. I really think about it like a new category of gaming. \u201cIn the same way it used to be, if you had a small bakery, you would try to find software to run your bakery. In the future, instead of buying software, somebody will have created an agent that\u2019s for running small bakeries, and it\u2019ll have all that information you need. It\u2019ll kind of run the bakery for you. I feel like gaming\u2019s gonna be very similar, where if you go into a really difficult or strategic game, you\u2019re gonna start bringing your agents with you \u2014 almost like your squad will be agents that you actually build and prompt and bring into existence. \u201cThis is a fun way for people to start to figure out, \u2018I can do this. I can control my own future. I can have custody of my own data, I can create my own IP, and then I can license it to other people.\u2019 I do think we\u2019re not far at all from really serious gamers building out, or in essence, duplicating themselves, and then being able to license that to other people. So you have Ninja on your team, all that stuff. We could build that for people right now if they wanted to do that.\u201d Bryan claims that AI Prize Fight is less of a challenge to the greater esports scene and more of a fun and interactive way to introduce players to the world of programming, comparing it to a \u201ctech demo\u201d of sorts. \u201cIt shows how fast, in essence, it can think, because it\u2019s a new type of esport where you have to think through your strategy in text form. You almost have to pregame the whole thing out. And so it\u2019s like, the new skill is, can you communicate your intentions and your strategy to the AI in a way that it can act on your behalf? \u201cYou can watch it happening in real time, which is also wild. So it\u2019s more like chess in that the two AI prompt fighters have to really think through what they\u2019re doing, and kind of watch game tape of the last person\u2019s fight and seek out what they\u2019re doing and tweak their prompts in between every fight.\u201d While bot vs bot fights are nothing new in the fighting game scene, the degree to which AI Prize Fight is taking the idea is unprecedented\u2026 and they\u2019re already making plans to expand. \u201cWe have plans to create games that actually would let the AI agent have even more control in the future,\u201d Anderson said. \u201cI would also say that this actually secures decentralized AI, and the reason it does is because it\u2019s a head-to-head competition. So it demonstrates that each one of these networks is capable of winning.\u201d For Bryan and Anderson, decentralizing artificial intelligence is a key part of their mission \u2014 and with companies like Apple making massive deals with OpenAI, it\u2019s more important for them now than ever before, and AI Prize Fight is just the tip of the iceberg in helping the average person take their information into their own hands. \u201cI bet most gamers have never thought about what they\u2019re doing as data collection,\u201d Bryan told me. \u201cIt\u2019s almost the same way that you can use Wi-Fi to map someone\u2019s house and things like that. If you looked at the data, you can see how someone plays, and it would actually give you a whole psychographic profile. Whether or not gamers care about that is a different thing, but you have a unique style and that\u2019s being mapped. The question is: Who\u2019s going to own it?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
AI Prize Fight founders share bold vision for future of esports YouTube: 6079aiA group of AI \u2018free thinkers\u2019 are hosting a bot-vs-bot tournament in Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. I met with the minds behind the event to understand why they put together such an unorthodox fighting game tournament and what their goals are in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}