We Taught AI to Play Games—Now It’s a $3.6 Million Company

This episode is a little different from our usual fare: It’s a conversation with our head of AI training Alex Duffy about Good Start Labs, a company he incubated inside Every. Today, Good Start Labs is spinning out of Every as a separate company with $3.6 million in funding from General Catalyst, Inovia, Every, and a group of angel investors from top-tier AI labs like DeepMind. We get into how Alex learned some of his biggest lessons about the real world from games, starting with RuneScape, which taught him how markets work and how not to get scammed. He explains why the static benchmarks we use to evaluate LLMs today are breaking down, and how games like Diplomacy offer a richer, more dynamic way to test and train large language models. Finally, Alex shares where he sees the most promise in AI—software, life sciences, and education—and why he believes games can make the models we use smarter, while helping people understand and use AI more effectively. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share. Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free. To hear more from Dan Shipper: - Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe - Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Timestamps 00:00:00 - Start 00:01:48 - Introduction 00:04:14 - Why evals and benchmarks are broken 00:07:13 - The sneakiest LLMs in the market 00:13:00 - A competition that turns prompting into a sport 00:15:49 - Building a business around using games to make AI better 00:22:39 - Can language models learn how to be funny 00:25:[redacted address] to evaluate and train new models 00:26:58 - What child psychology tells us about games and AI 00:30:10 - Using games to unlock continual learning in AI 00:36:42 - Why Alex cares deeply about games 00:44:37 - Where Alex sees the most promise in AI 00:50:54 - Rethinking how young people start their careers in the age of AI Links to resources mentioned in the episode: - Alex Duffy: alex duffy (@alxai_) - Good Start Labs: https://goodstartlabs.com/, good start (@goodstartlabs) - The book Alex is reading about the importance of games: [Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World](https://www.amazon.com/Playing-Reality-Kelly-Clancy/dp/[redacted phone]) - The book Dan recommends by the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott: [Playing and Reality](https://www.amazon.com/Playing-Reality-Routledge-Classics-86-dp-[redacted phone]/dp/[redacted phone])