How Playing Games Is Making AI Smarter

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. Dan Shipper sits down with Alex Duffy, our head of AI training, to discuss the spin-out of Alex’s new company, Good Start Labs, from Every. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Here’s a link to the episode transcript.

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This episode of AI & I is a little different from our usual fare: It’s a conversation with our head of AI training Alex Duffy about Good Start Labs, a company he incubated inside Every.

Today, Good Start Labs is 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.

Dan Shipper and Alex get into how Alex learned some of his biggest lessons about the real world from games, starting with RuneScape, which taught him how markets work and how not to get scammed. He explains why the static benchmarks we use to evaluate LLMs today are breaking down, and how games like Diplomacy offer a richer, more dynamic way to test and train large language models. Finally, Alex shares where he sees the most promise in AI—software, life sciences, and education—and why he believes games can make the models we use smarter, while helping people understand and use AI more effectively. Here’s a link to the episode transcript.