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The next issue of PC Gamer magazine features an interview with Brendan Greene, perhaps better-known as PlayerUnknown, about his career in game development thus far, the wider landscape, and what PlayerUnknown Productions is up to over in Amsterdam.
PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens at one point asks Greene about his prediction that the future of computing will be more local than we think, given that much of what we see from big tech right now is trending in the opposite direction: whether that’s cloud stuff, AI slop taking over the internet, or even just the fact that physical components for an actual local computer are becoming incredibly expensive. Does Greene still think the tide can turn on that?
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“I don’t think we’re getting intelligence in quite a while,” says Greene. “These are just statistical models that give you the next word and stuff said. There are domain specific machine learning models that are very useful in specialized things, but for the way they’re using wrappers and GPTs [generative pre-trained transformers] to try to provide the next service… it doesn’t scale.”
And yet “they’re wanting more and more data centers,” says Greene. “Georgia is getting rid of data centers. People are being, like, hounded out of their houses and stuff. That worries me. That’s why I think, to do work at scale, you can’t do it with a server. You have to figure out, how do you do this stuff locally?”
He does emphasise there are use cases for LLMs. For PlayerUnknown Productions, “the way we use it is very domain specific, if it’s in a very tight set of data, it is very good and very efficient, and it doesn’t really hallucinate so bad. It has to be deterministic, and that’s what we have,” says Greene.
“But we kind of get lumped in with the Generative AI brush or targeted because it’s not really clearly defined. Like, Apple got away with talking about ML for years, and then they mentioned AI, everyone was like ‘Ooh, AI’ but they had been talking about it. Machine learning is artificial intelligence but not really: but it’s the same field, and it exploits the same patterns. I just try to be as open as I can about how we use it.”
