It is nothing new that AI is on the rise but no one expected how fast it would flourish and grow. It is expanding so quickly to the point where, one of its latest technologies, the AI chatbot can now plan an entire wedding or give you its opinion on the plotlines of trending TV shows. This is a powerful form of tech that is ushering in a new digital era while attracting a slew of tech enthusiasts along the way. One of them is Mohamed Tawfik, a tech savvy Egyptian who made a shift in his career to jump on the AI bandwagon.
Initially working as a broadcast engineer, Tawfik started off by telling us how he began his career, “I started out travelling around the world and live broadcasting matches during the Premiere League, World Cup and many other big tournaments”. His true passion though was game engineering as that was what he studied during his travels abroad.
He wanted to enter the gaming field in a way that allowed him to also jump into the AI bandwagon. He didn’t just want to make games in the conventional sense but instead to leverage the technology in a way that transforms the gaming industry. “That is when I joined forces with Brenden Greene, one of the biggest names in the gaming world and the creator behind PUBG Battle Royale” said Tawfik.
Working with Greene opened big doors for Tawfik as he got his chance to use the immense potential of AI to create a more immersive and expansive gaming experience for users. The way he did that was by creating a game the size planet Earth, “with this kind of game, gamers would get to explore the entire planet inside the game which is something that’s never been done before.” He told us how games are limited when it comes to the size of their fictional worlds. Creating a game the size of planet Earth would take years if it was created by game designers and developers, so “that is where AI comes into the picture”.
Does that mean that today, AI has developed so much that it can now build entire games? To that, Tawfik replied with a confident yes, “our on-hand team would draw parts of the fictional world and then AI would come in and replicate those parts throughout the game”. The Ai would recreate the trees, roads and houses that were initially drawn out by the in-house video game designers. Using that technique, an entire fictional game the size of planet Earth was created. The game is called PlayerUnknown and is considered one of the biggest feats in the gaming world.
This barely scratches the surface at what AI technology can do as beyond gaming, the tech has managed to venture into other industries including media and news with several broadcasting channels taking on AI-generated TV presenters as their main hosts. So this makes us beg the question, what’s next? Will there come a point where AI will completely take charge?
Thankfully, Tawfik had a reasonable outlook towards where AI is heading, “Ai is merely a brain locked in a jail, it can’t do things on its own because of it has limited parameters. I do not think we will reach the point where AI will take over. I think our jobs will get easier so that instead of writing code we can just give the AI a few guidelines and it will create the program for us.” Tawfik also stressed on how even if AI gets more powerful, there will always be a governing body controlling and regulating the technology.
This is already the case, as just recently, the US senate held an entire hearing about the need to regulate AI and even before that, Elon Musk and several other prominent figures in the tech field signed a petition demanding to put a pause on developing a more powerful version of ChatGPT. These efforts are there to curb and slow down the rapid pace at which this tech is growing.
So far, through our conversation with Tawfik, we understood some of the potential of AI but knowing how rapidly it is evolving, no one can ever guess where this technology is heading next.