Rockstar Games has new openings for AI specialists, as indicated on their website.

The company continues to support Red Dead Redemption 2 and Grand Theft Auto 5, but they had already confirmed they are hard at work on Grand Theft Auto 6.

The actual listing on their website is for a lead data scientist in game analytics, for Rockstar San Diego.

Now, with the understanding that job titles are not set in the game industry, we need to get a better idea of who they’re looking for in the job description. This is how Rockstar described their game analytics team:

• The Rockstar Analytics team provide insights and actionable results to a wide variety of stakeholders across the organization in support of their decision making.
• We partner with multiple departments across the company to design and implement data and pipelines.
• We collaborate as a global team to develop cutting-edge data pipelines, data products, data models, reports, analyses, and machine learning applications.

Rockstar now also cites these as some of the lead data scientist’s responsibilities:

• Lead the design, development, and delivery of machine learning enabled solutions to address critical business or game questions.
• Assure Rockstar’s ongoing competitive advantage through best-in-class Machine Learning initiatives that have a high potential of applicability in industry.

Lastly, Rockstar very clearly lists knowledge of machine learning in their requirements:

• 8+ years of experience in machine learning, statistical languages, and systems such as Python and R.
• Proven experience deploying or overseeing the deployment of machine learning models to at-scale production environments.

There is currently a higher interest in AI because of the sudden rise of AI art generators like DALL-E and Midjourney. However, video games have had a longer relationship with AI and its development, that goes back decades.

There have been AI that were taught to play video games; however, the industry itself has spent a longer period of time using AI to make games themselves.

So you may be wondering, what is the big deal with machine learning? Machine learning is a form of AI, that replaces programming in video games with a small AI that acts on its own. And the most common application of this in video games is procedural generation.

So yes, you had already been playing with AI, when you explored a world in Minecraft, picked up a weapon in Borderlands, played a level of 20XX, and so on and so forth.

What Rockstar Games needs extensive machine learning for isn’t entirely clear. It should be easy to assume it will lead to content to the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6, but may also be used for Grand Theft Auto Online, which is the segment of Grand Theft Auto 5 that continues to get updates, and of course, remains profitable for Rockstar.

In the end, we may not even find out publicly what Rockstar is hiring new AI experts for, but it would certainly be a shock if they have a DALL-E or Midjourney like project themselves in the works.

Source: Rockstar Games via Aroged