Our New Incubation Raised $3.6 Million to Teach AIs to Play Games

TL;DR: Good Start Labs is spinning out of Every as a separate company to teach AI models to play games and generate high-quality reinforcement learning data for frontier labs. Alex Duffy, our head of AI training, built it starting with AI Diplomacy—where models battled for world domination—and will run the company.

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Today, I’m excited to announce a new Every incubation: Good Start Labs, run by our head of AI training Alex Duffy. It’s spinning out of Every as a separate company with $3.6 million in funding from General Catalyst, Inovia, Every, and a group of angel investors from top-tier AI labs like DeepMind.

Good Start teaches AI models to play games in order to generate high-quality reinforcement learning data for frontier labs. The company builds custom game environments and partners with popular existing games, allowing millions of players to naturally evaluate and train AI models just by playing.

It started as AI Diplomacy, a project where we taught frontier models to battle each other for world domination in the game Diplomacy. Alex and his co-founder Tyler Marques spent months building it, and when we launched it on Every in June, it went viral. Over 60,000 people read our story about it, and almost 50,000 people watched the models play live on Twitch. Researchers from top AI labs and academia immediately realized how valuable it was. See Exhibit A: