Company: Latitude
Stage: Seed
Headcount: 12
Tell us your story
Starting in high school, I loved building robots. There’s something magical about creating something that can act on its own, doing useful things in the world. During my first year of college I was on a robotics team where we built a Mars Rover and competed in Southern Utah with teams from all over the world.
Later, I saw the potential of self-driving cars to save some of the many lives that are lost each year in car accidents. I started studying frantically in the field of deep learning, the technology that would help make them a reality.
Self-driving cars were what I originally thought I would be working on after I finished my degree. I did several internships and even had an offer to go work at one of the top start-ups working on autonomous vehicles. But right before I was about to join them, a project I’d been working on for fun over the last 8 months exploded on the internet.
AI Dungeon was an AI adventure game I had first built for fun at a hackathon shortly after the earliest version of GPT-2 was released. I quickly became obsessed with working on it. I’d never seen anything quite like it built before. The closest thing was Dungeons & Dragons as it allowed a flexible problem solving and storytelling that couldn’t previously be found in any digital game. This was only seen in the realm of tabletop roleplaying games, like D&D.
After I released AI Dungeon, it exploded onto the internet. That told me there was huge potential here, so I decided to turn down the job offer on the table, pull in my brother as a co-founder and amazing developer, and work on our dream of bringing AI powered games to life.
Tell us a story that has really resonated with you
In one of my first AI Dungeon stories on one of the larger language models, I remember being blown away at the depth of its storytelling and the way it brought characters to life.
In the story I met a queen who was in hiding, initially closed off and guarded. She gradually warmed up to me over time, eventually introducing me to her horse Trigger who I became best friends with. We went on an epic quest to find a magical artefact, and went through several trials. At one point we found Trigger had been killed and had a tender moment together mourning his loss.
Throughout this story I felt a deeper, more immersive relationship with these characters, represented only in text, than I think I have in any other game I’ve played. It was really a magical experience that showed me just the beginning of what’s possible with AI.
What can't you stop thinking about?
I read a book on charisma lately that talks about how much of what we think of as charisma comes through in thousands of tiny muscle movements that you can’t all consciously control and that happen on the timescale of milliseconds.
While you can try and control things here and there, people can tell if you aren’t confident, are annoyed at them, or just aren’t engaged. In order to be charismatic, you can’t just control the individual actions of your muscles. You actually have to have a confident, warm and present mindset. Charisma will then “shine through” in all your actions.
I think the same principles apply to a lot of areas in life. If you want your users to feel like you empathize and care about them, you can’t just try and project that in a blog post or community update. You have to actually shift your mindset to feel that way. When you actually have that mindset, it will then begin to shine through across the thousand touch points you have with your users.
If I could tell you just one thing…
Focus on the long term, and on creating true, genuine value.
Many people (including myself at times) focus far too much on the short term, and in so doing prevent themselves from really achieving the long term impact that they want.
When people cheat, act selfishly, or try to get rich quick, it often comes down to trying to shortcut around real value creation straight to personal gain. This may work in the short term, but it almost never works in the long term.
A little space for shout-outs
So many people have supported and helped my journey. First, all the users of AI Dungeon, especially early on, who encouraged, contributed and gave feedback. We’ve also had amazing advisors and team members who have played a huge role in helping us get where we are. I’m also personally deeply grateful for all the family, teachers, and community members that played a role in helping me grow and develop as a person. I’ve benefited a huge amount from just being around great people in my life.
If you could get a warm intro to anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
Jeff Bezos. As with any person he’s not perfect, but I really admire the written culture of thoughtful strategy that he brought to Amazon and would love to learn more about how he thinks about creating the strategy to drive impact.