Nvidia’s new open-source AI is made to play games on its own—and I just know it’ll butcher online gaming

Continuing down its AI-focused path, Nvidia is now introducing a new, open-source AI solution trained to play games on its own. Trained on thousands of hours of gaming content, this new AI initially came to be as a robotics implementation, but is now being branched out.

The AI is called NitroGen, and was first shown off by Nvidia’s Director of Robotics, Jim Fan. He showed the solution in action: the “autonomous agent” as this “player” is called played The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Cuphead, Rocket League, and Blasphemous, among other titles, doing so quite capably, even if it’s in a primitive state of development.

The agent was trained on countless hours of gameplay, specifically videos where players put up their gamepads or control schemes that showed, in real time, what keys they were pressing, allowing the machine to learn motor controls and other aspects of real-time gameplay.

This makes sense given that the agent was initially meant for robotics, i.e., to enable AI-controlled robots to perform motor functions and other “human” actions, but it’s now branched out into purely software applications.

The fact that this is an open-source solution and generally available to anyone (including for the sake of creating forks and unique takes) makes me dread the future of online gaming.

Let’s take a second to consider what the widespread use of a capable autonomous AI would do: make bots appear in just about every single game, ruin your matches far more than bots already do, make it nearly impossible to discern low- and mid-level players from robots, and generally make online competitive gaming a hellscape.

And not only that. With the introduction of autonomous gameplay agents, we can almost say farewell to original gaming content on YouTube and other platforms. You’ll have ChatGPT or a related LLM generating a video script, an AI voice reading it out, and an AI playing the game in the background. The same goes for streaming and any other form of video content, which is already saturated by AI to an incredible degree.

We are ushering in our own demise, especially in these two areas. Bots pose a major problem in video games already, with organizations using them to farm cases in CS2, flooding the game with millions of fake players and decimating the game’s casual side. With these new capabilities, we can expect the bots to flow into competitive and other modes, being used to boost accounts, level them, or even derank them with utmost efficiency.

I genuinely cannot think of a single good use for this new AI, save for maybe applying it in a Soulslike game to make the enemies more capable and challenging, though I don’t know how that’d work any better than the systems FromSoftware had already invented for its games.

You cannot tell me bosses can get much better than Bayle, Sister Friede, Lady Maria, and so many others, which were made without any use of AI, and definitely without Nvidia’s NitroGen.