AI has a ‘symbiotic relationship’ with blockchain: Animoca Brands CEO

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a hot topic in public discourse inside and outside the emerging tech industry amid an increase in the popularity of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT and others.

At the Proof of Talk 2023 blockchain and Web3 conference in Paris, Cointelegraph sat down with Robbie Yung, the CEO of Animoca Brands, to discuss the relationship between AI, blockchain and gaming.

Yung told Cointelegraph that Animoca had been involved with AI for “a long time,” both incubating AI companies and utilizing it in game development. He said for art teams, generative AI changes the game in terms of productivity and development.

“Generative art has the potential to dramatically increase the productivity of art teams. It’s like giving farmers tractors instead of horses.”

AI has been particularly pervasive in the gaming industry. On May 29, Nvidia announced a new suite of AI tools called Nvidia ACE for Games. Among other capabilities, the tools use AI to give nonplayer characters (NPCs), also known as background players in games, more character capabilities.

The Animoca Brands CEO explained that AI integrations allow players to have a more interactive experience with the universe as it takes on a “life of its own.” When the game is blockchain-based, AI integration becomes even more relevant:

“AI has a very symbiotic relationship with what we do in blockchain. NPCs will actually become characters in a blockchain game, which means they will have transactions among each other.”

Yung pointed out that transactions between NPCs on a blockchain game will likely have to use crypto for transactions. He believes:

“Crypto will become the native currency of AI.”

If AI-enhanced games are able to create active and blockchain-based NPCs that are making transactions, he said it would be equivalent to having lots of employees that don’t sleep.

According to Yung, the current limitations of AI are similar to those seen in the blockchain space — cost and power. “Like everything in tech,” he said, “it will come down quickly.”

Related: Twitter suspends memecoin-linked AI bot after Elon Musk’s ‘scam crypto’ claim

The AI and Web3 industries have been a major focus for regulators worldwide as the technologies become more available to mainstream users. 

When asked about the implications of regulations on the gaming and metaverse industries that use emerging tech such as AI, blockchain and cryptocurrencies, he said he welcomes regulations for the sake of clarity.

“Clarity is what everybody’s after… It’s about being able to have an environment that’s more predictable because that’s conducive to investment.”

He said when investors have a more clear understanding of the rules, they feel more comfortable investing versus doing so in an industry with a lot of uncertainty.

“There’s a knock-on effect,” he said. “We get reluctant to invest; our shareholders get reluctant to invest in us, and so on. It’s not good for markets.”

Magazine: ‘Moral responsibility’: Can blockchain really improve trust in AI?