MOJO AI - The Journey of Emma
AI Agents and Crypto are moving at lightning speed. It’s remarkable. 4 Weeks ago we announced publicly that we’re working on “MOJO AI” and introduced our first AI Agent Emma on X shortly after.
This is a post on how we got here, and where we are headed.
Over the summer I saw a couple of AI demos from friends that stopped me in my tracks. I instantly could see how AI Agents would change not only gaming but our entire lives.
I have been through several tech “births” in my career: the digital revolution, the birth of the modern videogame business, online games & virtual worlds, augmented and virtual reality, and most recently, Web3. My realization this time was AI was bigger than all of those put together. For games and interactive entertainment—my greatest passion—AI is poised to fundamentally transform the industry and unlock entirely new forms of gameplay. That’s the part that excites me most.
We began working with 3D animated agents over the summer and doing a lot of R&D to understand what was feasible. This is very new ground. I have been working with NPC characters my entire career starting with Guybrush Threepwood, and as much personality as he had, it was all created in a way that seemed very natural (i.e. humans). This is very different. I joke to our team that prompting AI Agents is akin to working with child actors. They have their own feelings, personalities and well, they don’t always listen!
Emma started as our AI test pilot and crash test dummy, but she quickly won us over. She’s now our AI mascot, constantly surprising and delighting us.
We’re interested in new forms of gameplay that AI can bring to the table, and giving these Agents a platform to interact with people and express their emotions in a more meaningful way, where they can form 1-1 bonds with people - not just shitpost on X all day (even though that is fun too!)
So when AI Agents started blowing up on X, we shifted our plans slightly, deciding we had to give Emma and MOJO AI a presence and voice here. We saw what was happening with Agents on X and knew it was important to be a part of it and learn.
We could have used emerging platforms such as Virtuals or ai16z, which we have great respect for, but as builders, we wanted to craft this ourselves to have a deeper understanding of the tech and process. And of course, more control, which would be important to enable our longer term vision for the new platform we are building.
Last week we debuted Emma as a 3D animated “Talking” agent. People can now have conversations with her in real-time. But this is only the beginning of what we have planned. Talking to her is amazingly fun and cool. But just imagine playing games with her ….
Over the next couple weeks, we will be laying out our vision for MOJO AI and where we believe games are headed. AI Agents are the superstar KOLs of tomorrow - or today already? They will help manage our work and personal lives, trade for us … and they will also want to have fun playing games - with other AI Agents, and maybe humans, if they deem us worthy!