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Karpathy’s Pelican

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Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#91

Post by Jtarii »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #57
matsemann wrote: post #41

I'm pretty tired of the "Y made this game in Z tokens" all over the internet last week. They look impressive, and it's cool that it's even possible, but they're useless as games. None of them are any fun. They're like the most boring variant of basic controllers you can imagine. None have any cool mechanics. None have any tweaks made from hours and hours of testing. All have the same cel-shader.

We're all just impressed that it's even possible. No one is saying these are fun. I guess the next question is if they can be made fun without too much additional work with a human guiding the AI.

How well encoded is "good game feel" in the weights of an LLM. I am guessing not very well.

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#92

Post by throwatdem12311 »

matsemann wrote: post #41

I'm pretty tired of the "Y made this game in Z tokens" all over the internet last week. They look impressive, and it's cool that it's even possible, but they're useless as games. None of them are any fun. They're like the most boring variant of basic controllers you can imagine. None have any cool mechanics. None have any tweaks made from hours and hours of testing. All have the same cel-shader.

It’s called “demo porn” and it’s really obnoxious and borderline offensive to people that take the craft and art form of video games seriously.

If I see one more “one shot MMO” where you just walk around and do absolutey nothing or another menu slop idle battler or rogulike deck builder I’m going to go Postal in Minecraft.

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#93

Post by jmugan »

A lot of people are posting here about how bad the end product is, but that is kind of the point. Models have moved beyond generating images to a new kind of benchmark that better exposes understanding of the physical world, and we can use benchmarks like this to measure future progress. (Of course, it will have to be a qualitative/subjective measurement.)

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#94

Post by throwatdem12311 »

segmondy wrote: post #55
matsemann wrote: post #41

I'm pretty tired of the "Y made this game in Z tokens" all over the internet last week. They look impressive, and it's cool that it's even possible, but they're useless as games. None of them are any fun. They're like the most boring variant of basic controllers you can imagine. None have any cool mechanics. None have any tweaks made from hours and hours of testing. All have the same cel-shader.

you're tired because you lack imagination.

It’s the people spamming these shitty games that lack imagination.

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#95

Post by Aurornis »

matsemann wrote: post #41

I'm pretty tired of the "Y made this game in Z tokens" all over the internet last week. They look impressive, and it's cool that it's even possible, but they're useless as games. None of them are any fun. They're like the most boring variant of basic controllers you can imagine. None have any cool mechanics. None have any tweaks made from hours and hours of testing. All have the same cel-shader.

I’ll never not be amazed that we can type some words and get those results back out.

However I do agree that the results are much worse when you try to use them. They look great in screenshots and video clips which makes them perfect for content farmers.

All of the LLM generated games I’ve played have been really bad to play, though. I even tried my hand at a simple game, thinking I could iterate on it with prompts to fix some rough edges. After the initial productivity burst every change turned into a slog of tokens with one thing changing and something else breaking it. I would try to use my remaining weekly token budget across Anthropic and OpenAI to refine it at the end of every week but after a couple weeks it felt like I wouldn’t be getting anywhere without scrapping it and going back to having the LLM build it one step at a time with my careful instruction.

Which, in retrospect, is the only way I can get usable output of an LLM for anything complicated, so it’s not surprising. It’s a fun reality check project though.

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#96

Post by egeozcan »

Jtarii wrote: post #84
matsemann wrote: post #41

I'm pretty tired of the "Y made this game in Z tokens" all over the internet last week. They look impressive, and it's cool that it's even possible, but they're useless as games. None of them are any fun. They're like the most boring variant of basic controllers you can imagine. None have any cool mechanics. None have any tweaks made from hours and hours of testing. All have the same cel-shader.

LLMs currently have 0 imagination, I have strong doubts that will be solved any time soon even if they continue to become superhuman at everything else. They just have the creative instincts of a 50 year old accountant.

> They just have the creative instincts of a 50 year old accountant

That's oddly specific and it'd really hurt my cousins feelings :)

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#97

Post by cautiouscat »

jmole wrote: post #90
revel wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are bad at creative work and I don’t see them improving any time soon. Try asking an agent to write a story about raccoons. It will almost certainly involve either stealing food or raiding trash with a 50% chance of having a character named Pip. If a location is mentioned, it’ll be Elm Street. I guess this is the average story and, similarly, the average game is boring and predictable

Seriously, what is the deal with Pip! I was experimenting with childrens' fiction more than a year ago and 9 times out of 10 you'd get a character named Pip unless you were specific in the prompt not to do so.

I recently saw a study on this actually. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26492

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#98

Post by dgellow »

matchagaucho wrote: post #6

It's difficult to think in exponentials. But this demonstrates we're a couple orders of magnitude away from generating 1:1 hyper-personalized entertainment and media for individuals, rather than the masses.

If that becomes a thing, that will be fun 2 weeks, then become a gimmick only a small niche will be using. What’s the point in having a hyper personalized entertainment? People want to experience the games, movies, tv shows, books others created and are also experiencing

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#99

Post by fwlr »

I really dislike this AI programming thing of “Mr LLM, go slam your face into the problem until there’s no problem left, then call me back”. (Not sure if it’s a recent trend or a fundamental nature.)

It always brings to my mind some words from Rich Hickey:

    I think we’re in this world I’d like to call “guardrail programming”. It’s really sad: we’re like, “I can make change because I have tests!”. Who does that? Who drives their car around, banging against the guardrails, saying “whoah, I’m so glad I have these guardrails so I can make it to the show on time!”
I don’t think I really have a point to make here, other than it just feels like someone’s released a bunch of carnival bumper cars onto the highways.

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#100

Post by dofm »

revel wrote: post #61
matsemann wrote: post #41

I'm pretty tired of the "Y made this game in Z tokens" all over the internet last week. They look impressive, and it's cool that it's even possible, but they're useless as games. None of them are any fun. They're like the most boring variant of basic controllers you can imagine. None have any cool mechanics. None have any tweaks made from hours and hours of testing. All have the same cel-shader.

LLMs are bad at creative work and I don’t see them improving any time soon. Try asking an agent to write a story about raccoons. It will almost certainly involve either stealing food or raiding trash with a 50% chance of having a character named Pip. If a location is mentioned, it’ll be Elm Street. I guess this is the average story and, similarly, the average game is boring and predictable

Elias Thorne!
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