Taste is the new programming language (w/ Astrocade CEO Amir Sadeghian) | AI Basics

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
All right, everybody, welcome back to AI Basics. AI Basics, this is where we go over the fundamentals, the basic things that founders need to know. And we do this for legal, we do it for finance, and now we're doing it for AI. You can find all these episodes, thisweekinstartups.com/basics, and AI Basics is brought to you in partnership with our friends at Google Cloud.
I'm really excited about today's guest because we're going to talk a little bit about how AI is impacting video games with us today. Amir Sadeghian, he is the founder and CEO of Astrocade. This is an app that allows you to easily create original video games and share them with your friends. Welcome to the program, Amir.

**Amir Sadeghian** (0:44)
Thanks, Jason. Thank you for having me, man. I'm very excited about this.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:47)
Well, you are in a category that I am seeing all over social media, which is games that were state of the art, I don't know, maybe 10 or 20 years ago, people are now able to fork, to build using AI and you have a platform to do that. So tell us a little bit about what your product and service does and why you built it.

**Amir Sadeghian** (1:13)
I can tell you a little bit of my story, but Astrocade, basically, you said it really well, is a platform that anyone can create any interactive experiences. Games is a large category of interactive experiences, but they're a lot more like education content, companions that we saw, a lot of different interactive content. But the core of it is any kind of content that is interactive. So anyone can create those content. The way they can create it, and the reason I say anyone can create it is through a natural language, because you can just simply describe, you can just describe any kind of content, any kind of game, and the AI, our AI system actually generates them. And the other exciting part of Astrocade is once you create those kind of content, you can basically just press a publish button and publish it to a feed of content. Very similar to TikTok and YouTube. There's a feed of content that all this content is generated with from creators across the world. We have more than 100,000 creators from various countries, more than 100 countries creating this kind of content and publishing it, which is super, super exciting.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:13)
And yeah, it's astrocade.com, yeah? Yeah, absolutely. And so when you look at the site, I mean, there's just all the greatest hits that you can imagine from motorcycle games to person versus person, fighter games, all of these different formats. But you do them in a format that looks like TikTok, where you can scroll through them. If you don't like this game, you just scroll down to the next one. And you can play a casual game, scroll down to the next one, play a military game, scroll down to the next one, play an archery game. I mean, it's just incredible the creativity people have. And the idea of creating a video game, people would have to go to college, they would have to do internships. You would be five, six, seven years into training to actually make a game. And now you're telling me they can just do a prompt, make a game and then publish it and then play with the friends, yeah?

**Amir Sadeghian** (3:13)
Yes, exactly. It's hard. Making games is really, really hard. And I will tell you a little bit why this is so exciting. And it actually, I think I've been accidentally being trained to build Astrocade during my entire life. I can tell you a little bit like, so the co-founder of me, one of my brothers is actually my CTO and co-founder. And we've been raised in four different continents. We were born and raised in Spain for five years, five years in Zimbabwe, 10 years in Iran, and then we came 13 years in US. US has been the longest place we've lived.
And the interesting thing, I think when you're raised this way, the interesting thing is you just see so many different cultures. Every country you go is completely different. The people are different, the culture is different.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:59)
The food, the traditions, the topography and the architecture, everything is unique.

**Amir Sadeghian** (4:06)
And it's so beautiful because each of these places have been built by different people with different cultures, with different mindsets. And I think one of the biggest things we had was from the beginning, we were all, by the way, gamers. We were like hardcore gamers, like I'm now more of a casual gamer. I'll call it even a player rather than gamer because when you say game, like it's a different visual. Yeah. And we were like, okay, like why is this not happening with the kind of like the gaming and interactive content? And it boils down to what you just said, actually, because creating a kind of a game, it's so hard. You have to go get educated. And if you need to have multiple set of skills or build a studio to do it, it needs coding, right? You need to know how to build assets. You need to build how to tune the game, how the game feels very, very hard. And you need to also understand the psychology of player, right? And make something really fun, right? So basically, what we did is we removed all these barriers, right? We removed all these barriers. And thanks to Generative AI, we started the company in 2022 And the reason, again, is another part of my life. I've been in AI 2013 I did my PhD at Stanford AI when AI was actually not cool. Nobody was talking about AI at the time. And in 2022, we saw that the technology is actually getting to a place that you can actually generate these interactive worlds. It took us a while to basically improve the technology, to be able to make fun content, but that's basically the reason.