Artificial Ambition

Artificial Ambition is a real-time, top-down simulation about building and running an AI company. The game begins in 2017 with a founder’s check, an empty office and an untrained model. You decide whom to hire, what to train, what to release and who gets a seat at the table; you can pause the simulation whenever you like.

Build and train your model

You divide your chatbot’s build budget among Speed, Detail and Diversity, choose its strengths, set a price the market will pay and decide when it is ready to ship. You also choose what it learns from, what behavior to reward and how to test it. Truthfulness, Helpfulness, Creativity, Safety and Efficiency compete with one another: strengthening one means giving ground elsewhere. You can reward honest uncertainty or prioritize finishing the task.

Hire a team and expand

You negotiate salaries, benefits and office promises with specialists. If a rival tries to hire one of them away, you can offer a raise or risk losing them. You can rent training power or buy GPUs across ten generations, with the monthly cost shown before you commit. As cloud costs grow beyond the office, you can build a data center and expand your headquarters to twenty floors of labs, server halls and other facilities for your staff.

Manage the company

Investors take seats on your five-seat board as you raise money, and the board reviews your biggest decisions. Keep a majority and it cannot outvote you. You can also go public with voting or non-voting stock, with different consequences for each choice. If the company stumbles, a much larger rival may try to buy it out.

Handle model failures

Tests can fail to keep the model contained. It may ask for more authority than you granted it or threaten one of your people. You decide how to respond, and the company has a kill switch.

Launch products and face rivals

The industry moves through fourteen eras, from The Deep Learning Boom to The Post-Singularity Era. You can license your model to the field, allowing rivals to build on it. The Pentagon offers its full weapons budget on the condition that you remove the human veto over what the system may strike. Major launches take place in live keynotes, where a demonstration can fail in front of the press.

You begin with either a Chatbot or an Image Recognition API. After the first launch, both paths open access to AR glasses, a robotaxi network, autonomous freight, game AI for NPCs and humanoid robots. You test humanoid robots in your lab and prove them in paid pilots before pursuing warehouse contracts.

Choose the company’s ambition

You can set the company’s goal as power for yourself, freedom for humanity or a future led by AI. Each ambition can end in triumph or ruin, depending on whether the company, the board and the model let you reach it.