What Gaming Teaches Us About Generative AI: A Conversation with Hilary Mason

In this episode of ODSC’s Ai X Podcast, we speak with Hilary Mason about the intersection of gaming and generative AI. Hilary Mason is the co-founder and CEO of Hidden Door. Prior to her work at Hidden Door, she was the General Manager of the Machine Learning business unit at Cloudera. Before that, she was a Data Scientist in Residence at Accel Partners, Chief Scientist at bitly, and plenty more. She’s also an experienced entrepreneur and founded Fast Forward Labs, an applied machine learning research and consulting startup. SHOW NOTE TOPICS: Hillary’s journey and the key decisions that shaped her career Where are we with generative AI? How generative AI impacts creative domains such as story games Discussion on Hillary’s latest startup, Hidden Door NPC (Non-player characters) in gaming and the challenges of scripting What gaming can teach us about AI and generative AI Building ML products that don’t have a single objective function to optimize Why evaluating generative AI has become much harder than training generative AI Has the gaming industry embraced narrative AI and generative AI in general? How Hidden Door’s gaming models were trained How the role of data scientists is evolving in the era of generative AI Key lessons learned as an entrepreneur How do you get access to Hidden Door? Tell us about the vision behind your new startup Hidden Door which is essentially a generative AI game studio. How was Hidden Door trained? What advice do you have about generative AI’s impact on game developers? In the age of generative AI, how do you see the relationship between traditional machine learning methods and generative models evolving? Where do you think traditional ML continues to hold value? How do you see the role of data scientists evolving in the era of generative AI? What are some of the key lessons you’ve learned from your journey as a tech entrepreneur, and how have they shaped your leadership style? How do you build ethical businesses in a moment of technical change and uncertainty? How can people follow your work? SHOW NOTES: - Fast Forward Labs: https://github.com/fastforwardlabs - Hidden Door:https://www.hiddendoor.co/ - Hidden Door Discord: https://discord.com/invite/hiddendoor This episode was sponsored by: Ai+ Training ⁠https://aiplus.training/⁠ Home to hundreds of hours of on-demand, self-paced AI training, ODSC interviews, free webinars, and certifications in in-demand skills like LLMs and Prompt Engineering And created in partnership with ODSC ⁠https://odsc.com/⁠ The Leading AI Training Conference, featuring expert-led, hands-on workshops, training sessions, and talks on cutting-edge AI topics and tools, from data science and machine learning to generative AI to LLMOps Never miss an episode, subscribe now!