AI Dungeon: Dragon Model Upgrade

You can now play AI Dungeon with one of the most powerful AI models in the world.

Latitude Team
4 min readJul 14, 2020

When I built the first version of AI Dungeon at a hackathon my senior year of college it was a fun and wacky adventure, but it was nothing like what it’s become today.

The first version of AI Dungeon was entertaining in its own wacky way, but it could almost never form a cohesive story.

We’ve released a ton of new features to improve the experience since then, including adding multiplayer, creating a quest completion detection system, improving how we handle model output, and adding more complex systems for world memory.

And now we’re releasing the most dramatic improvement in AI Dungeon since we launched, the Dragon model.

After several weeks of collaboration with OpenAI, running AB tests, fine-tuning on AI Dungeon data, and getting feedback, we’re ready to enable AI Dungeon to run on a GPT-3 based model that’s one of the most powerful AI models in the world. We’re calling the AI Dungeon version of this new model “Dragon”. It’s available now for premium users.

Since testing on Dragon, we and the users who have tried it out have been blown away with how good it is at generating rich and engaging experiences and at weaving them into a cohesive story.

Here’s an example of the kind of story that Dragon is capable of generating. Contrast it with where AI Dungeon was just one year ago. The progress is since then is nothing but mind blowing.

Most people would be hard pressed to tell if this was written by an AI or a human author.
The AI is able to imagine dynamic characters with rich personalities that react in incredibly lifelike ways.

Now people experienced with AI might be thinking “that’s cool and all, but surely this is the cherry picked, best out of 10 example” and yes I particularly liked this sample so it may be slightly cherry picked, but this level of coherence is the norm, not the exception for this model. This story goes on for 100s of actions with the same level of coherence. You can read the whole story here.

When I eventually find the “Book of Essence” I’m even able to seamlessly read entire sections from it. The game invents a complex magic system and underlying theory behind why it works and describes the whole system as I read the book. This ability to create lore and magical systems and share it with the user in such fluid ways makes you wonder just how immersive and powerful these type of games will be 5–10 years from now.

This is a paradigm shift for games and entertainment in general. How games are built and played in 10 years is going to look dramatically different from how they look today.

At Latitude, as the pioneers in this revolution in gaming, we’re committed to achieving our vision of creating games where you aren’t constrained by the limited options the developer wrote for you to choose from, where NPCs aren’t just art assets with some hand crafted dialog, and where worlds aren’t frozen, walled off boxes.

With the rapid advances of AI we can make worlds where you can shape the world in an infinite number of unique ways, where each experience, character, and place is unique and living, where worlds change from your actions and the inhabitants of those worlds feel alive and real. There are still ways AI Dungeon falls short of those goals, but we’re getting closer and closer to achieving that reality and we hope to inspire others to follow us in achieving this dream.

If you want to follow the progress of AI Dungeon and this new era of AI generated games follow me on twitter where I periodically post thoughts and progress updates.

To experience magical adventures like those described, try AI Dungeon out (especially with the Dragon model). I promise it will be like no experience you’ve ever had before.

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