😺 Is Real-Time AI Video Technology the Future of Video Games?

Welcome, humans.

We’re going LIVE today at 10am PST to chat all things “open source” (well, open weight*) AI! Come join us and get all your questions answered on how to run a local model on your own computer using LM Studio, why you might want to do this in the first place (as opposed to just use ChatGPT), and anything else you wanna chat about!

Just click this link here at 10am PST to join in. Ask us anything… including prompt requests you want us to test out… and we’ll run ‘em!

Here’s what happened in AI today:

• Decart released Mirage, a real-time video transformation AI with 40ms delay.
• CoreWeave acquired OpenPipe, a startup for custom AI agents.
• Apple readied Siri’s AI search and is testing Gemini on Apple servers.
• Mistral neared a $14B valuation via a reported €2B round.

P.S: We had an awesome chat with Credo AI’s Navrina Singh on WTF AI governance is, how it works, and why you need it… definitely check out this podcast episode if you want to run open models or deploy AI at scale in your own products anytime soon!

Your Next Zoom Call Could Be From a Wizard's Tower

Remember when video filters just meant dog ears on Snapchat? That's ancient history now. Dean Leitersdorf just showed up to Dan Shipper’s Every podcast and mid-sentence transformed into a wizard shooting candle light from his hands, then turned a tissue box into a portal gun that actually shoots when you pull the trigger.

This is Mirage, the first real-time video-to-video AI model from Decart. It transforms any video stream—your webcam, a game, whatever—with just 40 milliseconds of delay. The next version? 16 milliseconds.

Here's the wild part: Unlike other AI video tools that generate entire clips at once, Mirage works frame-by-frame like an LLM predicting the next word (Dean calls it “next frame prediction.” Dean's team spent six months solving the “error accumulation problem”—where models gradually degrade into static colors—by writing assembly code for GPUs.

Here’s a few examples of what’s already happening w/ Mirage:

• A new Minecraft mod that transforms the entire game on command.
• Casually turning GTA V into a winter wonderland in real-time.
• Launching their own consumer app (Delulu) for real-time selfie transformations.

Oh, and in case you forgot back when we shared Mirage’s launch, you can try it out yourself right now by clicking here.

As we’ve written before, many players are focused on World Models atm. For example, yesterday Tencent dropped HunyuanWorld-Voyager, an open-source world model (GitHub) that generates camera-controlled 3D environments (paper). It's currently #1 on Stanford's WorldScore leaderboard and exports directly to 3D formats—no extra tools needed.

While Tencent and Google’s recently demo’d Genie 3 focus on 3D reconstruction for VR and simulations, Decart's betting on instant transformation of existing content. However, Dean believes we need both approaches: deterministic code for the “bones” (like game physics, rules, etc) and AI for the creative “muscles” (textures, visuals). As Dan points out in the episode, you could make a 3D game with simple logic and use Mirage as the “skin” to make it look like a legit AAA game (demos).

The bigger picture: Dean thinks AI will create entirely new entertainment categories beyond chatbots. His take? Every 12-year-old knows ChatGPT does their homework, but they have no idea what AI to use when they're not doing homework.

Gaming's just the appetizer. Real-time transformation tech could reshape video calls, content creation, even how we perceive digital reality. In a way, we could be watching the birth of a new medium: one where the line between real and generated dissolves every 40 milliseconds. TBH, we wouldn’t be shocked if Meta tries to buy Decart to make “the metaverse” an actual thing…

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Prompt Tip of the Day.

Most people use AI like it's Google—type a question, cross fingers, hope for magic. But Ruben Dominguez Ibar from The VC Corner says we're doing it all wrong in his comprehensive prompting guide.

His game-changer? Think of prompts as code, not questions. The better your input logic, the better your output.

Ruben breaks down the “5 Pillars of Perfect Prompts”: Role (who is the AI?), Goal (what do you want?), Context (essential background), Constraints (format/length/tone), and Examples (show what good looks like).

He also shares two frameworks: CLEAR (Concise, Logical, Explicit, Adaptive, Reflective) for creative tasks, and RGIO (Role, Goal, Input, Output) for structured requests.

As Ruben says, bad prompts are expensive: they waste time, money, and sanity through endless retries and vague results. Check out his guide instead!

Check out all of our prompt tips of the day from August here!

Treats to Try.

*Asterisk = from our partners. Advertise in The Neuron here.

1. *Play.ht converts your written text into realistic human-sounding voices for audiobooks, YouTube videos, and podcasts in 40+ languages.
2. DeepMind's URL Context pulls live data from any website, PDF, or image when you paste the URL, so you can compare product prices across sites or extract key points from research papers.
3. You.com builds AI agents for businesses that search your data and the web (just raised $100M), while Exa builds search engines for AI models, not humans (just raised $85M).
4. Maxly.chat lets you run multiple AI queries simultaneously on a visual canvas (instead of waiting in a chat thread), branch conversations like Git, and collaborate with your team in real-time (here’s a demo from Maxlee on X).
5. Apertus is Switzerland's new open-source AI model that actually respects your privacy and data rights (we’re gonna try this one out on today’s live!).

Around the Horn.

Wild…

• OpenAI expanded its employee secondary sale to ~$10.3B at a ~$500B valuation; employees decide by end‑September, with closing slated for October.
• Apple planned a new Siri web‑search system (called “World Knowledge Answers”) and is apparently testing Google’s Gemini on Apple servers for it.
• CoreWeave acquired OpenPipe, a Y Combinator-backed startup that helps enterprises develop customized AI agents with reinforcement learning.
• Mistral could be about to raise €2B at a $14B valuation for its open-source language models and Le Chat chatbot as Europe's answer to OpenAI.

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Thursday Trivia

One is real, and one is AI. Which is which? (vote below!)

A

B

Which is AI, and which is real?

The answer is below, but place your vote to see how your guess everyone else (no cheating now!)

A Cat’s Commentary.

Trivia answer: A is AI, and B is real (a screen cap from Grant’s favorite YouTube channel, Aloha Got Soul, a Honolulu record label store that features awesome DJ sets from their record store, always intermixing well-known classics, underground hip hop, and local Hawaiian artists; this one is specifically from the Talib Kweli DJ set).