Radiant, The world’s first story-telling ai assistant

As humans it is in our nature to identify patterns. It’s that ability, which to some degree, allows us the occasional accurate glimpse of the future. More predictably, if your idea of seeing the future is knowing you’ll begrudingly pay ten dollars for a coffee in the following week. It gets a bit more hazy when considering where technology may take us in the next several years. It more usually appears to us as chaos. But, and it’s a big but, sometimes, we catch a glimpse past the veil and our observation of something greater coalescing is accurate.

How the team at Chronicle came together is one such event that has me suspiciously looking over my shoulder checking for a smirking old figure with a white shaggy beard and sandals. Maybe he’s walking in a sunbeam. Too many random moments of serrendipty have occured, but then again, I am a pattern seeking primate and it could all be smoke and mirrors. Regardless, when an opportunity presents itself that aligns with every goal you’ve ever had in life, you either take it, or look back forever with the regret of knowing, on whatever terms, you were offered your dream and rejected it.

I, 'Davetrippin' by my Youtube alias and Charles David Jameson by another name, had until recently lived in Kyoto for the past year and a half... attempting to work on a borrowed dream. It would not come to pass and life compelled me again to move and make a new plan. I had always thought if not for the cinema direction that coding was something could hold my interest. To give some background my dad was a 1st generation programmer and wowed me as a child with those skills in the form of hacking the first PC games that were ever released so that I, a child utterly obsessed with games and reading, would have a never-ending supply of new experiences to enjoy. As time went on though I found my inability in key topics such as math would prevent, or at the very least, form a daunting barrier between me and ever pursuing the art of coding. I focused instead on pure art. But now at the end of Kyoto and a decade dedicated to filming, what should I do?

I should attempt to code, my deficiencies be damned. I would do this by registering for a popular coding bootcamp in Tokyo by the name of Le-wagon. I studied for several months beforehand and felt like I’d be in a strong enough position to not be left in the dust once it got started. Oh boy! Was I ever wrong. My lack of technical intelligence once again reared its ugly head and I was again forced to confront the fact that when things get technical, my head, only barely metaphorically, explodes. There are times in life when it gets hard, and you have a choice, you either give up, or keep on going. This scenario and I are good friends. Sometimes it feels like an abusive relationship but what I’ve learned from the wounding is how essential it is to developing the character required to make a dream into reality. This is a long winded way of saying I’m a few sandwiches short of a picnic when it comes to the new skill-set but I’ll give it my best anyway.

Time passed at the bootcamp and one day, while in line for the bathroom, I heard a voice behind me, “Hey, you’re Davetrippin?”. I wish I could tell you I turned and said stoically in response, “I was”. But instead opted for the much more elequent, “ya?”. With that upward intonation like my answer was a question. I was addressed by the one and only, Connor Alexander Minto. He had, much to my surprise, seen some of my old videos. We fast developed a rapport. Connor would lead the class in all things coding and I would accost him for help on the various activities we worked through.

Where Connor dominated the coding, my breakthough came in the form of an unexpected turn in the curriculum. I had read it in full before beginning the camp but somehow missed the part where each must present a pitch for an app to develop. Everyone in the class (32 students) would pitch, and of those pitches, 8 selected to build. Those 8 determined by each student voting on the projects they wanted to work on. I may not be the best coder, but if there’s one thing I have more than enough of, it’s ideas, so I got to work on a pitch.

I had used chatgpt a lot before coming to the bootcamp as a mentor to help me learn coding. During that time I observed the potential that this new technology had for assisting story-tellers and writers. But exactly how, I was not yet sure. I needed another brain. Immediately I knew who to speak with: my extremely skilled dungeon master friend. Perhaps he could think of some pain a narrative ai assistant would heal. I was not wrong. He identifed the struggle of telling a good story in dungeons and dragons while in combat.

I’ll pause here for the uninitiated and give a brief explanation of dungeons and dragons for context. The game is essentially a shared story-telling experience wherein one God nerd, the dungeon master, leads the story and provides the rules for the world. Time is split between a few different activities that move the story forward. Exploration is the most straightforward. During this activity players make their way through the world and the soul focus of the dungeon master, hereafter referred to as the DM, is to tell a good story. A decent narrative is easiest to establish here as there’s little else to consider. That all changes when you enter combat. There are a million rules to consider, who’s turn it is, dice rolls and much more. Telling a good story during that time can become difficult for the aforementioned reasons. My friend observed that if something could assist him telling the story in that critical time it would be tremednously helpful. Radiant was born in that moment.

I would aim to create an ai assistant which would assist DMs in their effort to tell a good story. I worked hard on the pitch putting in extra hours honing it, practicing it. We had 3 minutes to present and if you hoped to win hearts and minds to your cause it needed to be watertight. No room for error. Pitch day would come all to quickly. I was excited until being informed that PowerPoint, the software in which I created my pitch, was outdated. Everyone was going to use google slides. Being assured that the computer we must use for the presentation might not work with the PowerPoint slides I’d prepared spiked my cortisol levels. What could I do other than keep going?

Shot through with adrenaline I began my pitch. Time flew by and the intial lead-in felt decent. I reached crucial point whereon the next slide I would introduce the app and it broke. No one even saw the name of the app. 1 minute had passed. We then spent the next two minutes fixing the program and managed to succeed just as my time ran out. I tell you candidly now, I was crushed. All that effort and excitment to be flattened by the brick wall of circumstance. The presentations continued as did my slide into a defeated posture in my chair. Eventually people began to vote and we finally reached the moment of truth where all voted for projects would be revealed and the 8 selected shown on screen with the corresponding team that would work on each.

Second to receive enough votes was Radiant.

What! I hear you say, dear reader. How could this have happened? Connor provided me with the answer afterwards: “Dave, you didn’t need to do a pitch. You wouldn’t shut up about it for the week before we presented. You kept asking people for feedback on what could make it better. You didn’t need to say a word. We all knew what you wanted to make,” he said. Humbled, I must admit it was difficult to enjoy the moment. I was so wrapped up in my woe that such a sudden change in the course of events took me totally by surprise. I recovered though and made every effort to make sure the members of my team knew they had my complete dedication and appreciation for having chosen my pitch as the one they’d like to build.

What followed was two focused weeks of bringing this pitch from concept to reality prototype to presentation day. I am tremendously proud of what the team accomplished in that time. I knew from the moment we started working, as much as any man can, that this was something I wanted to take further.

Life makes sense when we look back, and when I look back, to ignore the confluence of events that led to Radiant being built would be, in a word, stupid. A man I respect a great deal for his remarkable presience and belief in the strength and beauty of the human spirit is Ray Kurzweil. Currently head engineer at Google he is perhaps better known for his books, one specifically, ‘The Singularity Is Near’. Among the many points I’d cherry pick from what Kurzweil has to say on the topic of inventing something, the one which spoke most to me identified how invention is a matter of two things: idea, and timing. You can have the best idea in the world but if the timing is wrong there’s not much you can do about it. Nicola Tesla might have a few things to say on the topic. Radiant feels like this kind of crossroads. To be the first at anything in the modern context seems a fool’s game and mostly you’d be right. But always history grants us new opportunties, in this case, in the form of technological progress.

Large Language Model AI marks a moment in history for those who can see the opportunity, to do something that has never been done before. We were the first bootcamp to attend Le-wagon with access the LLM api. I had always in my life been interested in coding but never able to do so until this moment. That combined with meeting Connor, to me, is a kind of magic. And I can’t wait to see what kind of spell we can cast.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. Through this channel we will communicate with the community weekly. We will touch on all aspects of development and as well share our journey as a team. If my story piques your interest and you too are a seeker of glorious pioneering innovation, then please do consider filling out our alpha tester application. Radiant is nothing without the community of people who have so far contributed to its progress and we firmly believe this should continue to remain the case. Radiant is for everyone, the spirit of it, and the goal. We are all of us characters in this great story called life, and a story is meant to be shared.