Gaming + The Internet = AI Boom? Not Quite.

The internet was a big deal. It led to the explosion of multiplayer gaming, which led to the explosion of GPU innovation and growth, which is now leading to AI development.

The evolution of gaming did start long before but also in parallel to the internet. It would have always evolved, though way slower probably, even if multiplayer experiences weren’t introduced. People would’ve bought the equivalent versions multiplayer games as single player games (for example, Cyberpunk 2077, red dead redemption). Plus if we subtract gaming, the internet still contributes massive amounts of text, image, and video data - and this data was crucial raw material for modern ai models (llms, vision, image gen).

Would we have reached the state of AI that we’re at without gaming ON the internet?

We’re now oversimplifying causality (Internet → Multiplayer Gaming → GPU boom → AI) by even asking this question, but it’s probably not wrong, just missing other notable details. Here are the facts:

1. Gaming evolved in parallel to the internet, not necessarily because of it (see aforementioned games)
2. Cryptocurrency mining was a massive accelerator since it drove GPU Demand, which drove R&D for more specialized and advanced chips, leading too….(find contributing breakthroughs)
3. Scientific computing endeavors - where we try to model extremely chaotic and complex natural phenomenon like climate, protein folding, and particle physics in order to better predict catastrophic events the world or expand our understanding of it
4. NVIDIA CUDA, whose development made GPUs usable for non-graphics based computation
5. “Single player games drove GPU innovation just as hard (Crysis was the benchmark meme for years” (research this?)

We can safely say that gaming evolved parallel to the internet, and shared the same “upstream wind” so to speak, but it’s too nuanced to say that the AI arms race wouldn’t continue without it.