Inworld AI names advisory board

Inworld AI today named an advisory board to help the start-up as it builds a "Character Engine" to create AI non-player characters, brand ambassadors, and educational assistants.

The advisory board includes Bing Gordon, Danny Lange, Jon Snoddy, and Neal Stephenson.

Gordon is a former EA chief creative officer and current partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who has also served as an advisor to Spotify, Niantic, and Dapper Labs, and has held seats on the board of directors at Take-Two, Duolingo, Zynga, and Amazon, among others.

Lange is VP of business intelligence and artificial intelligence at Google, and has previously held AI and machine learning positions at Unity, Uber, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Snoddy was a senior VP at Walt Disney Imagineering, and before that served as chief creative officer at Sega Gameworks and was a project director in Lucasfilm's THX group.

Stephenson is the best-selling author of Snow Crash and a dozen other books, and also served as the former chief futurist at Magic Leap.

"We are very fortunate to have such an accomplished group of advisors who are icons and visionaries in their respective fields," Inworld CEO and co-founder Ilya Gelfenbeyn said. "And while they work across different mediums, they share our goal in harnessing the power of AI to supercharge the way we tell and experience stories in games and other forms of entertainment. We're already seeing the impact they can make individually and as a powerful collective."

Stephenson, who is also chair of blockchain outfit Lamina1 (in which Gordon is an investor), believes Inworld could revolutionize the future of gaming.

"I started collaborating with Inworld AI from the moment I learned about the company and as we've been doing initial experiments, I am convinced that there are new ways of telling stories available to us now that are as different from existing games and movies, as movies were from live theater a hundred years ago," Stephenson said.

"And just as filmgoers back then adapted quickly to the innovation of multiple camera angles, players in the next few years will become accustomed to interacting with AI-driven characters in an immersive environment and creators such as myself will benefit from being able to realize their characters and tell their stories in a new way."

An Inworld representative confirmed for GamesIndustry.biz that there is no blockchain element to the business.