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Regression games has raised $4.2 million to bring the power of AI to gaming and esports leagues.
That’s pretty good for a 25-year-old solo entrepreneur with a two-month-old company. But Aaron Vontell comes from a rare breed of tech experts in a new field of gaming.
The Philadelphia startup is the brainchild of Vontell, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who helped create Battlecode, an AI gaming competition for students. Battlecode was a great source of inspiration for the new company.
Most AI games focus on non-player characters, or NPCs, who serve as the computer-controlled cannon fodder slaughtered by human players. But with Regression Games, human players can create AI that plays the game.
“I’ve always been passionate about AI and gaming and esports,” Vontell said in an interview with GamesBeat. “We are creating a product and ecosystem where people can experiment, play and compete with artificial intelligence in games. And so exactly what that means is that instead of using a controller or keyboard to game, players are creating AI and writing code to actually control the characters. And the idea is to bring this really new, exciting technology to gaming and make it really accessible for people to actually play with and not just compete, but also dive deeper into this exciting field of AI sports. “
After graduation, Vontell became a senior software engineer at NEA-supported Instabase and missed the competitive joy of applying technology to games. So he started Regression Games, which is developing a platform and ecosystem that uses AI to enable players to compete and hone their skills by writing code to control characters in their favorite games.
“I was an early employee of Instabase. I was working on machine learning for low-code products to extract information from documents,” says Vontell. “So I have a background in machine learning and AI.”
New Enterprise Associates (NEA) led the round with the participation of Andreessen Horowitz, BBQ Capital, Roosh Ventures and angel investors.
Vontell plans to use the new capital to grow its technical team and accelerate development of its first AI-driven gaming testing platform, in partnership with existing games and game studios.
Regression Games builds the platform and ecosystem to make AI gaming and esports accessible and enjoyable for everyone. The platform allows players to write code and AIs that control characters, debug strategies in real time, compete for prizes in tournaments and top positions on leaderboards, and team up with friends to build the best bots possible.
Instead of traditional gaming where players use a controller or mouse and keyboard, Regression Games users will program algorithms and machine learning models to fight against others. The AI platform will integrate with both existing games and original games developed by Regression Games.
With more than 3.2 billion gamers worldwide, 175 U.S. collegiate esport programs, and more than 47% of U.S. high schools teaching computer science, this intersection of gaming and coding is poised to grow in the coming years, according to the report. company. By 2028, the video game industry will be worth more than $435 billion, as will an estimated 45 million programmers by 2030.
“This is more like letting the consumers – the actual players – interact with these AIs. And essentially you create your own NPCs to play for you in the game. That’s a good analogy,” Vontell said. released a lot of exciting AI and machine learning models that really show that we can push the boundaries of how we compete in games and how we play in games.”
A good example is the machine learning model OpenAI 5 that was developed in 2017 to play Dota 2. It showed that AI can get really good at playing games.
Vontell provides different levels of player expertise. One competition might be for those new to coding, while another might be for high school or collegiate-level machine learning experts. Vontell is recruiting.
Origin
Vontell has spent the past few years working on low-code/no-code systems for non-technical people to harness the power of large machine learning models.
He started studying AI in college as early as 2014. He became interested in startups and started playing Battlecode as a freshman and eventually helped run the club. Battlecode was an annual AI gaming competition at MIT where students built virtual bots to compete in video games.
“People really enjoy being able to use their technical skills to compete and win prizes, and with the spread of AI – now is the perfect time to bring AI gaming to the masses,” said Vontell. “There’s a lot of great work coming out of the ML community in using neural networks to play games like Minecraft, Dota 2 and Atari games. I want to take those ideas to the mainstream and give people an accessible place to have fun using and competing with artificial intelligence in games.”
It’s unusual for VCs to fund a company at such an early stage, but Rick Yang, NEA’s general partner and head of consumer investing, said in an email to GamesBeat, but they were impressed with his work at Instabase, where NEA was also an early investor .
“We funded a few founders who come from Instabase, which prides itself on attracting very entrepreneurial talent. His technical skills and talent were evident at Instabase, so we had confidence in him as a founder,” Yang said. hacking” of the game, and there’s a lot of overlap between programmers and gamers. We also validated many of the ideas about bringing hardcore AI to games when we talked to several trusted people at major game developers.”
That made it a pretty easy decision, Yang said.
Vontell believes the AI competition tools and approaches will be useful for more than just the players, but also for game studios looking to improve AI capabilities or run their own AI competitions.
“A lot more people are gaming these days, and there’s a lot of complexity in planning the NPCs and AIs used in the metaverse, online battle arenas, etc,” Vontell said. “The tools and platform we’re building for players to compete will also be very useful for developers looking to build AIs into their games. It is well known that existing bots are missing in games, and we can do so much more than what is currently being implemented.”
Regression Games plans to hold a private alpha test and tournament featuring players on its AI platform in the coming months. Interested players and game developers can visit here to sign up for the mailing list.
“I’m excited to get this out and see what the players think,” Vontell said.
sapient AIs?
Does Vontell believe intelligent or humanoid AI is on the horizon?
“It’s an interesting question and I discuss this a lot with my friends who are in this space,” he said. “Everyone always has a very different answer, as if it’s already there or in 100 years. I don’t have a concrete answer, but I think we need to define the goals we’re trying to achieve. What is our definition of feeling? You can create an AI that can play a very simple Pong game, and it will be very different from League of Legends, right?”
AI tends to scare people, given dystopian science fiction. And Vontell said people can find malicious ways to adopt technology. But he believes regulation can protect us as we build AI technology.
“At Regression Games, we make sure we build these AIs responsibly,” he said. “But that’s an important question we need to ask ourselves.”
Vontell believes that gaming has not fully leveraged AI. He wants to pick it up and put it in the hands of players with a new spin on user-generated content.
“There’s a wide spectrum of ways AI can be applied to games, so I think AI is very modular,” Vontell said. “And the way you can apply it, imagine mixing and matching these different approaches for different pieces.”
For the roadmap, the company will expand and create some Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to allow AI players to work in existing games. That will allow players to compete and build the community, and it will generate feedback from players.
“We will then be in talks with studios and game developers and players to further develop the product and get it into the hands of more players and game studios,” said Vontell.
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