The Format #023

Last week we moved into our new office! It’s been really great, with lots of awesome conversations, a good amount of DIY and a challenging sofa that refused to get around a corner and into our office (don’t worry we did it in the end!).

Ada Ventures also publically announced their investment in OPENFORMAT. We're thrilled to be part of their second fund, Sarah even got to spent time with some of the other founders in this cohort earlier this week in London.

Anyway onto the news, here are some of the things we’ve been discussing and found particularly interesting over the past two weeks…

Discord opens up to games and apps embedded in its chat app

Discord are offering developers the tools to build games and apps that can be played natively inside a Discord server. This is VERY interesting news, and aligns with something we’ve talked about once or twice… Tiny Apps.

Imagine a developer using Discord as their starting point for creating an app, they share it in multiple servers, get some traction in one of them, then use this to understand which audience to build their MVP app for and which features they would want. They are able to reward the people who played the original app in Discord and these rewards can be carried into the MVP app.

It’s a new way of building and rapidly testing apps, rewarding (early) users and creating experiences that exist portably in multiple different places. Love it!

A generalist AI agent for 3D virtual environments

There have been almost constant developments in AI’s ability to game. This matters because games are a playground that can represent the real world, albeit a somewhat simplified and controlled version of it.

So an AI model that can complete almost 1500 different tasks- from driving a car to chopping down trees- with just the screen and a simple text-based goal as inputs, will actually have huge real world implications. (Even if it’s trained on Goat Simulator 3…)

NVIDIA GTC 2024: CEO Jensen Huang’s Predictions About the Future of Prompt Engineering

With last weeks release of Devin (the AI software engineer) and the ‘rise’ of no/low-code tools, the future of ‘the developer’ is now being questioned. One thing is for certain, more and more people will be able to build, and tools that help them do this are critical. Our view: these tools should promote open, sustainable and ethical innovation.

What the digital streaming revolution of the 2000s can teach us about the AI revolution today

Napster, iTunes and Spotify completely flipped how the music industry operated. This digital overhaul was an opportunity to create an open and artist-first system. Sadly, it didn’t turn out that way.

This article draws parallels between that revolution, and what we are currently seeing with AI → we’re entering a period of time which will determine the future of the internet. We can create an internet made of closed ecosystems driven by a few monolithic tech companies, or one that is open, ethical and transparent.

Ethereum Scalers Immutable and Polygon Unite for $100 Million Gaming Fund

A lot of people believe that we are seeing the start of a huge technology shift in favour of consumer ownership, as a result $100 million has been injected into the Web3 gaming space. We’re looking at applying these gaming principles and Web3 technology to other industries, creating an open format inspired by the success of the gaming industry.

OPENFORMAT News

Ada Ventures invested in OPENFORMAT as part of their recent fund

We have an awesome group of investors and our lead VC is Ada Ventures. We are part of their second fund and it’s amazing to be part of such a diverse and innovative group of companies.

We have a new office!!! 🤩

Last Tuesday we moved into our new office. It will definitely need a bit of love before it captures the ‘OPENFORMAT personality’ (which I’ve heard will involve lots of plants, a big mural, rugs, much more colour and funky lighting) but it really is awesome to be working alongside everyone. There’s a real sense of energy!

Plus we’re right in the middle of Bristol so the food is an added bonus.

Get real about education with Roster

Our CEO, Sarah, sat down with Roster to discuss how the technology OPENFORMAT is building can be used to bridge the gap between the current ‘traditional’ education model and the education that is needed for a generation raised in a technologically native society. We’ll be uploading the whole discussion to our Youtube soon but in the meantime here’s a clip from the conversation.

And that’s all for this week.

Have a great weekend, Dan and the OPENFORMAT team 👋🏽

Prompt (generated by Sarah): “We need a whiteboard.”