Why Microsoft is right company to make a next gen flight sim

[abrams_tank 7,426]

1 hour ago, Greazer said:

• I expect the scenery is going start looking better at ground level because the sim world will not always be solely for flight.

I think this is the goal of Microsoft. If they can make the ground and terrain look very good, they will start to use the MSFS engine for other games and other software applications. I think Microsoft knows they are sitting on a golden egg. Lots of money can be made from their world engine, if they can refine it and make it look really good.

[eslader 1,786]

4 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

if the MSFS team determined that it's not feasible to offer it for free, they could end up charging a price like BeyondATC for the online premium voices too. But because Microsoft owns the technology, the price could end up being much lower than what BeyondATC is charging.

As I understand it, BATC is just passing through what they're being charged to us. I could be misremembering this, but I'm fairly sure I saw where they said they did not intend to make any profit on the AI time charges.

 

4 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

For ChatGPT, it's still free to use ChatGPT at the basic level.

The free-level ChatGPT is essentially a tarted-up Ask Eliza. It's not live-generating voices. It's basically a statistical chart: "a large percentage of questions like the one I was just asked were answered like this so I'll answer like this too. If I'm told I'm wrong, I'll look for another high-percentage answer until the human goes away."

The ChatGPT we've been playing with is somewhat like if someone who did not speak Japanese were given a Japanese question and response sheet. If you hear A, you respond with your choice of B, C or D. If they express confusion, try B or D. Using that guide, they could hold a whole "conversation" in Japanese without ever knowing what they were talking about. That's ChatGPT in a nutshell.

It's just a more-sophisticated chatbot than other chatbots we're used to. Having messed with it, it's still a digital moron. Just adapting it for text-based ATC would involve making it smarter ($$) and then you'd need to add in the voice synthesis ($$$$).

4 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

For the satellite & photogrammetry streaming, Microsoft has not charged extra for that, for the 3.5 years that MSFS has been released.  So somehow, Microsoft (ie. Jorg) worked out that they didn't need to charge users extra for the satellite & photogrammetry streaming, up to this date.

Streaming data isn't all that expensive anymore, despite what ISPs would have you believe. There's no AI going on with the sat/photogram streaming. AI was used for the photogrammetry, but that was done once, and the output was stored. It's not doing it live every time someone flies over a photogrammetry area. The amount of data we're pulling down from Microsoft for that is a tiny fraction of their data throughput. This goes back to my EINIAC example: High-throughput data streaming used to be hard to do and expensive. It's not anymore. The same will be true of live-generated AI responses, voices, etc. Crazy expensive right now, but the hardware will get more efficient and the AI will get more sophisticated and eventually our phones will be able to host their own AI and we'll wonder why it ever cost that much.

 

[Amon1973 1,421]

11 hours ago, eslader said:

Your premise assumes the actual AI processing is cheap enough for a huge company like Microsoft to be able to offer it for free. It's not. ChatGPT spends a fortune to run itself. Microsoft would have to do the same. The supercomputer MS built for OpenAI has 285,000 CPUs and 10,000 GPUs. 

 

 

The lead dev of Beyond ATC said himself that because of the current demand from a limited amount AI providers, they can charge inflated fees, and he said as time goes by, these costs will reduce going forward.

 

https://youtu.be/mEo8_LC2uSY?si=-kC2h7QboxbJbJsS

Edited February 24 by Amon1973

[G-RFRY 1,712]

MS funds ASBO to make MSFS. As for the future who knows the present sim is built on incredibly old MS Code. Even MS are moving the O/S onto code that will make some old compatible PC`s door stops and some old windows 11 PC`s may soon have a problem with new requirements coming.

As for the future flight sim MS may let ASBO do their own thing and let them loose.

[abrams_tank 7,426]

1 hour ago, eslader said:

As I understand it, BATC is just passing through what they're being charged to us. I could be misremembering this, but I'm fairly sure I saw where they said they did not intend to make any profit on the AI time charges.

...

...

It's just a more-sophisticated chatbot than other chatbots we're used to. Having messed with it, it's still a digital moron. Just adapting it for text-based ATC would involve making it smarter ($$) and then you'd need to add in the voice synthesis ($$$$).

As @Amon1973 mentioned, the fees may be inflated now.  So if the MSFS team is using technology owned by Microsoft, the cost could be much lower.  Doesn't mean that it will be free, but it's possible for the MSFS team to get much lower costs, simply because Microsoft owns the technology.

[abrams_tank 7,426]

2 hours ago, eslader said:

The free-level ChatGPT is essentially a tarted-up Ask Eliza. It's not live-generating voices. It's basically a statistical chart: "a large percentage of questions like the one I was just asked were answered like this so I'll answer like this too. If I'm told I'm wrong, I'll look for another high-percentage answer until the human goes away."

The ChatGPT we've been playing with is somewhat like if someone who did not speak Japanese were given a Japanese question and response sheet. If you hear A, you respond with your choice of B, C or D. If they express confusion, try B or D. Using that guide, they could hold a whole "conversation" in Japanese without ever knowing what they were talking about. That's ChatGPT in a nutshell.

It's just a more-sophisticated chatbot than other chatbots we're used to. Having messed with it, it's still a digital moron. Just adapting it for text-based ATC would involve making it smarter ($$) and then you'd need to add in the voice synthesis ($$$$).

Interesting. This question is directed to anyone, not just eslader. So anyone can answer.

Does anybody know how SayIntentions.ai is using ChatGPT then? Isn't SayIntentions.ai using ChatGPT as part of their ATC instructions?

Edited February 24 by abrams_tank

[UrgentSiesta 932]

10 hours ago, HighTowers said:

YouTube is out of control with ads now.

Not if you pay for it - like you do with your Flight Sim or Addon 😉

[Matchstick 1,886]

7 hours ago, eslader said:

The free-level ChatGPT is essentially a tarted-up Ask Eliza

 

That what ALL "AI"  systems are whether free or not.

There's NO intelligence, no understanding of either a questions it's asked or the response it creates
As you say it just uses massive charts to create responses based purely on the likely hood of words appearing together in the dataset it was trained on.

It would be a huge step forward for people's understanding of the limitations of the systems to call them what they are - large language Models LLMs rather than (the purely marketing/hype based term ) "AI", but that ship has sailed.

Edited February 24 by Matchstick

[techman 151]

When ChatGPT gets the right context and the rules it is able to "control" flight traffic. You can try this yourself anytime. Its not "intelligent" per sé but it is able to apply a ruleset which was given. 

So with the usage of a "trained" AI in the background I would say that MSFS2024 - if MS choses to apply AI-functions - there is a pretty wide bandwidth of use cases. ATC, Ground equipment, Cars, Trees, Seasons, Weather, Water... lots of stuff that can be supported by AI from an external source. 

[abrams_tank 7,426]

11 hours ago, techman said:

So with the usage of a "trained" AI in the background I would say that MSFS2024 - if MS choses to apply AI-functions - there is a pretty wide bandwidth of use cases. ATC, Ground equipment, Cars, Trees, Seasons, Weather, Water... lots of stuff that can be supported by AI from an external source. 

Yup.  I think the impact AI will have on video games and flight simulation in the coming years will be huge.  It looks like the MSFS team is using AI to make the terrain much better in MSFS 2024.  They already did use Blackshark AI to make the terrain, housing, buildings, and vegetation more accurate for MSFS 2020.  But the demo they showed of MSFS 2024 where the terrain was much higher fidelity because of their use of AI, looked really promising.

The use of AI for other things, such as ATC, and stuff, has a huge potential in flight simulation.

Edited February 25 by abrams_tank

[Tierborn 188]

The title should read, "Why Microsoft is the right company to MADE a next gen flight sim"

[Ident 198]

FS2002 was a great example of a next gen sim. It introduced AI planes, ATC, Auto-Gen and VC...not sure about live weather. Ever since then, its mostly been improvements to the sim. Right now I see 2024 as a good improvement to 2020 which has matured to deliver what I feel the general consensus wants a sim to be. Ever since FS2002, the areas of weather, ATC and AI have been slow improvements, if any, from one version to the next.

AI/AGI, the cloud and hardware development seem to be knocking at the door for what could be an opening to make a jump like we saw from FS2000 to FS2002. I feel BeyondATC is showing two areas (AI and ATC) that can greatly be improved to the point that we finally feel true progress is being made and this kind of tech should be part of the main sim. Weather is another area that should see core improvements. With the help of all the tools and data collectors out there from weather radar, satellites and ocean buoys...what I see as weather in my GarminPilot overlay of weather cells could/should be seen in the sim in real time. Same goes for waves in the seas, sounds and oceans as well as AI road traffic, Boat Traffic and Trains. Notams that knock out navaids, close taxiways/runways/airports based off of RL Notams. "X" and barriers on airports that are 3d models are interjected into airports while lighting and navaids are inop all based off of real world data.

Other aspects that the cloud could help out in is maintaining an active environment. Instead of starting the sim in real weather which just loads up the current real weather, a next gen sim would maintain a real world model which would load you into it. By doing this, you would see puddles left over from rain that happened prior to your session, snow accumulations based off of both melting temps and recent snow storms.   Plows that plow the airports and can be seen doing so which would make landing at airports during major snow storms limited at best. Pilot controlled lighting and finally airspaces that are hot get you a fighter escort (if only to show as a visual that the user is operating in a restricted or prohibited airspace at that time). That to me, would be a next gen sim.

Edited February 25 by Ident

[jcomm 5,939]

MFS 2020 is ALREADY the Next-Gen General Purpose Flight Simulator...

MSFS 2024 will continue the "franchise"...

 

[Fielder 3,682]

The AI in 2024 will be provided by ChatGPT . But there are other and in some ways better AI systems. Such as the one Bill Gates invested in recently. LikeWise.

In  few quick very simple tests, I find they are a deeper AI than ChatGPT. And answer inquiries more intelligently and without doctrinaire baggage. They cite references in their detailed responses to input questions. Fewer hallucinations (ratio of probable fiction to probable fact, e.g. a black female dominated 18th century European parliament).

But they are not wider than ChatGPT and cannot do nerly as many types of tasks.

https://www.techopedia.com/why-did-bill-gates-invest-15m-in-ai-assistant-startup-likewise

[Krakin 5,775]

2024 is already doing things that I consider next gen. 3D out of 2D and the improved CFD modeling come to mind.

2020 was Asobo's chance to get their feet wet and I think 2024 will be their opportunity to show us what they're really made of. Can't wait for more info!