Kuyda: OpenAI temporarily abandoned language models for video game agents
Eugenia Kuyda · Seeing The Future from AI Companions to Personal Software · Nov 5, 2025 · at 40:29
Eugenia Kuyda, founder of Replika and CEO of Wabi, recalls collaborating with early OpenAI researchers after Y Combinator exchanges.
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“And very quickly they stopped working on language models, and we were very upset because we really wanted to continue going there, but they didn't want to talk about any language models because no one was really working on them and that may have made us feel very strange because we were so set on, continuing and believing in language models, but they completely moved away to shift it to playing video games and all of these kind of agents, kind of rebuilding the worlds and agents in those worlds, reinforcement learning for that and all these other interesting things.”
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