Why Video Games Still Don’t Use Modern AI | Julian Togelius (NYU)

The Information Bottleneck · Oct 31, 2026 · 1h 13m · transcript

Julian Togelius, an NYU professor and co-founder of modl.ai, is living the dream of every kid who grew up as a computer geek and gamer. He’s been doing AI research on video games since 2004, back when people told him it wasn’t real research.

So why do most video games still run on behavior trees and dialogue trees when we have LLMs? Julian’s answer is that games are designed not to need AI. Most genres were locked in decades ago, and nobody has figured out how to design a good game around a model that can say anything.

We talk about the state of the game industry and why so many developers…