How to play

You run an AI lab. You start in a dorm room with $60k and a dream. Here's everything you need to know, without spoiling the good parts.

The basics

1. Train your first model

Tap Train a new model on the Lab or Models tab. Pick a modality (text, code, image…), a use case, a size and how you'll ship it. During training you split effort between pre-training, post-training and launch prep. Every modality has a sweet spot. Your Lab Notebook remembers what worked, so you get better at it every launch.

2. Ship it and survive the reviews

Launch day gets a keynote, a review score out of 10 and a crowd that cheers or throws tomatoes. Better models get more users and more revenue. Revenue fades as your model gets old, so keep a new one in the oven.

3. Hire, research, scale

Hire people (every hire comes with a personality, and some personalities do not get along), buy GPUs, research new tech and move to a bigger HQ. Raise money when cash gets tight. The Business tab has contracts for quick cash.

4. Caffeinate responsibly

The Office Shop sells boosts (cold brew, energy drinks, a mandatory-fun hackathon) that make your team train faster for a few weeks, and permanent office upgrades you can actually see in your office. Yes, there is a shark tank.

5. Things will go wrong

Model escapes, lawsuits, board drama, market crashes, a social feed that roasts every launch, and if you get reckless enough, a hearing in front of Congress. Your answers matter.

6. Pivot and come back stronger

Going bankrupt isn't game over. Pivot to start a new lab with Legacy Tokens for permanent perks. Optional challenge modifiers make the next run harder and pay out more tokens.

Launch day. Pray to the reviewers.

The endgame: The Collective

Most tycoon games end when you win. This one hands you an AI of your own. The Collective is a real neural network that trains on your phone, inside the game, from the way you play.

It learns from you

Every decision you make, from which model to train and when to ship to who to hire and when to just wait, is recorded as training data. When you open The Collective (Lab tab, once you've moved out of the dorm) and press Train, the network studies your decisions, practices running copies of your lab, gets corrected, and practices again. You can watch its loss curve fall in real time. No servers, no cloud: the training happens on your device.

Then it plays for you

At the end of every training run the Collective sits an exam: it runs your lab against the game's own autopilot on the same simulated futures and gets an IQ score. Deploy it and it starts making real moves in your lab: shipping models, hiring, buying GPUs. It earns you a revenue bonus, and it keeps playing while the app is closed. Retrain it as your lab grows. If a new network does worse on the exam, the game keeps the old one.

% to Full RSI

Everything you do also moves a single number: % to Full RSI (recursive self-improvement). It grows with every decision, every launch, every new era and every training run, and it survives pivots, so no run is ever wasted. Along the way the Collective unlocks new abilities. We're not going to tell you what they are.

Fair warning: it's slow on purpose. Playing an hour a day, reaching 100% takes most players about three months. What happens to your office when you get there is for you to find out.

Somewhere around here, things get weird.

Quick tips

Fast-forward (2× and 4×) is your friend once a training run is underway.
A model that ships with a weird personality bug isn't always bad news. Sometimes the bug is the product.
Loot drops from launches and contracts. The collection book carries over between pivots.
Every day there is a new Demo Day: everyone gets the same seeded two-year run. Compare scores on the leaderboard.
You can play fully offline. An account is only for cloud saves and leaderboards.

Stuck or found a bug? See Support. Want to see how you stack up? Leaderboards.