Add README and documentation
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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# How to Play
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## Getting Started
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When you start a new game, you name your AI company and begin in the **Startup era** with $50,000 in seed money. Your goal: build the world's leading AI company and eventually achieve AGI.
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The game runs in real-time at 1 tick per second. Use the speed controls in the top bar to play at 1x, 2x, or 5x speed, or pause to plan your next moves.
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## The Core Loop
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The fundamental cycle of the game:
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1. **Buy GPUs** — Purchase compute hardware in the Infrastructure page
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2. **Allocate compute** — Split between training new models and serving inference
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3. **Train a model** — Start a training run in the Models page
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4. **Deploy** — Put your trained model into production
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5. **Earn revenue** — Users pay for API access and subscriptions
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6. **Reinvest** — Buy more GPUs, hire talent, fund research
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Everything else in the game builds on or modifies this loop.
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## Key Resources
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### Money
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Your primary resource. Earned from API revenue and consumer subscriptions. Spent on GPUs, talent, data, and energy. Shown in the top bar with income trend.
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### Compute (FLOPS)
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Total processing power from your GPU fleet. The main bottleneck — you never have enough. Split between training (building new models) and inference (serving users).
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### Reputation (0-100)
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Public trust in your company. Affects talent acquisition, user growth, investor confidence, and regulatory treatment. Composed of safety record, public perception, employee satisfaction, and regulatory standing.
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### Talent
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Headcount across four departments: Research, Engineering, Ops, and Sales. Each department has effectiveness and morale scores that affect their output.
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### Data
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Training data quality and quantity. Better data produces better models. Acquired through the data marketplace or generated passively from your user base.
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### Research
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Progress through the tech tree. Unlocks better GPU tiers, model architectures, efficiency improvements, and safety techniques.
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## Game Systems
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### Infrastructure
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Your datacenters house GPU clusters. Seven global regions are available, each with tradeoffs:
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- **US-West / US-East** — Balanced costs, good latency to North American users
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- **EU-West / EU-North** — Higher energy costs, strict regulation, access to EU market
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- **Asia-East / Asia-South** — Lower costs, emerging markets
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- **Middle-East** — Cheap energy, political risk
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Each datacenter has a size (GPU slots), cooling level, and redundancy level. Higher redundancy reduces GPU failure rates but costs more. GPUs can fail randomly — lost hardware means lost capacity until you replace them.
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GPU types unlock through research. Early on you have basic GPUs; research unlocks progressively more powerful (and expensive) tiers.
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### Research
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The tech tree has two dimensions:
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- **Generations**: Small → Medium → Large → Frontier → AGI-scale models
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- **Specializations**: Reasoning, coding, creative, multimodal, agents
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Research projects require researchers and time. Completing projects unlocks new capabilities:
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- Better GPU tiers
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- Training efficiency improvements (quantization, distillation)
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- Safety techniques (alignment research, interpretability)
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- New product capabilities
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### Models
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Training a model requires:
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- **Compute**: How many FLOPS to dedicate to training
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- **Data**: Training data tokens to use
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- **Time**: Training runs take real time (boosted by researcher and engineer quality)
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When training completes, your model gets capability scores across five dimensions: reasoning, coding, creative, multimodal, and agents. A composite benchmark score determines its market competitiveness.
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#### Safety vs Capability
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This is the game's central tension. Safety research improves your model's safety score but penalizes benchmark performance. Low safety scores risk:
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- **Safety incidents**: PR disasters that damage reputation
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- **Regulatory backlash**: Higher compliance costs
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High safety scores mean:
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- Lower benchmarks (competitors may outperform you)
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- Better regulatory standing
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- Protection from reputation-damaging incidents
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There's no single right answer — it depends on your strategy.
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#### Model Tuning
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After deploying a model, you can tune its behavior:
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- **Presets**: Quick settings (Helpful-Safe, Performance, Creative, Balanced)
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- **Sliders**: Fine-grained control over safety, creativity, verbosity, and speed/quality tradeoff (unlocked after completing alignment research)
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### Market
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Revenue comes from two sources:
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**Consumer Subscriptions**: Users pay a monthly fee for your chat product. Subscriber count grows based on model quality and shrinks from churn. Higher quality models and competitive pricing accelerate growth.
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**B2B API**: Enterprise customers pay per token. Set your input/output token pricing to balance revenue against demand.
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#### Overload Policy
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When demand exceeds your inference capacity, you choose how to handle it:
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- **Queue depth**: How many requests to buffer
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- **Rate limits**: Max requests per user
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- **Degrade quality**: Serve faster but lower-quality responses
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- **Prioritize enterprise**: Give B2B customers priority over consumers
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Each choice has tradeoffs. Degrading quality hurts satisfaction. Enterprise prioritization frustrates consumer users.
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#### Open Source
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You can open-source deployed models. This:
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- Boosts reputation significantly
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- Attracts more talent
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- Reduces direct revenue from that model
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- Increases subscriber growth (community effect)
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### Talent
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Four departments, each critical:
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| Department | Effect |
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|-----------|--------|
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| Research | Speeds up R&D projects and improves model training quality |
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| Engineering | Speeds up model training and infrastructure reliability |
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| Ops | Reduces infrastructure costs and failure rates |
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| Sales | Increases enterprise API demand |
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Hire to increase headcount. Morale affects effectiveness — keep your teams happy by managing workload and company reputation.
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### Competitors
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Three rival AI labs compete with you. Each has a personality:
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- Some prioritize safety, others move fast
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- Some are big-tech giants with deep pockets, others are scrappy startups
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- They release models, gain users, and react to your moves
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In later eras (Big Tech and AGI), you can **acquire** competitors, absorbing their talent and technology.
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### Events
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Random and conditional events keep the game dynamic. Categories include:
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- **Industry**: Breakthroughs, open-source releases, benchmarks
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- **Regulatory**: Hearings, compliance requirements, AI bills
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- **PR/Cultural**: Media coverage, safety debates, public opinion shifts
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- **Internal**: Employee issues, technical problems
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- **Market**: Demand spikes, pricing pressure
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- **Geopolitical**: Export controls, energy crises, natural disasters
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Most events present 2-3 choices with meaningful tradeoffs. Some trigger chain events with delayed consequences.
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### Funding
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Raise capital through VC rounds as you grow:
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| Round | Amount | Dilution | Key Requirement |
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|-------|--------|----------|----------------|
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| Seed | $100K | 10% | $100/s revenue |
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| Series A | $500K | 15% | 100 users, 20 reputation |
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| Series B | $2M | 12% | 1,000 users, 30 reputation |
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| Series C | $10M | 10% | 10,000 users, 40 reputation |
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| Series D | $50M | 8% | 50,000 users, 50 reputation |
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| IPO | $200M | 20% | 100,000 users, 60 reputation |
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Each round permanently dilutes your founder equity. Time your raises carefully — you want enough runway to grow but minimum dilution.
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## Era Progression
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The game has four eras that unlock progressively. Transitions happen automatically when you meet thresholds:
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### Startup → Scale-up
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- Revenue: $10,000/s
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- Best model capability: 15+
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- Reputation: 30+
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### Scale-up → Big Tech
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- Revenue: $1,000,000/s
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- Best model capability: 50+
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- Reputation: 60+
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### Big Tech → AGI
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- Revenue: $100,000,000/s
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- Best model capability: 90+
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- Reputation: 70+
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Each era unlocks new game systems and sidebar pages. Watch for the "NEW" badge on newly available pages.
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## Strategies
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### The Safety-First Path
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Invest heavily in alignment and interpretability research. Your benchmarks will lag competitors initially, but you avoid safety incidents and build strong regulatory standing. Good for steady, sustainable growth.
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### The Move-Fast Path
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Minimize safety investment, maximize raw capability. You'll lead benchmarks and attract users quickly, but safety incidents can crater your reputation. High risk, high reward.
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### The Open-Source Play
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Open-source your models to build massive community goodwill and attract top talent. Revenue per model drops, but subscriber growth accelerates and reputation soars. Strong mid-game strategy.
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### The Vertical Integrator
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Invest in multiple specializations and diverse products. Spread your compute across reasoning, coding, creative, and multimodal capabilities. More resilient but slower to dominate any single benchmark.
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## Tips
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- **Don't neglect infrastructure redundancy.** GPU failures at scale can cripple your capacity.
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- **Watch your burn rate.** It's easy to over-hire and run out of money before your models generate revenue.
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- **Timing funding rounds matters.** Raise too early and you give up equity cheaply. Raise too late and you run out of runway.
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- **Safety research compounds.** Each safety project improves all future models.
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- **Check competitor activity.** If a rival just released a strong model, expect to lose some subscribers unless you respond.
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- **Events have lasting consequences.** Read the options carefully — some choices trigger follow-up events.
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- **The data flywheel is real.** More users generate more data, which trains better models, which attract more users.
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- **Deploy your models.** A trained model sitting idle generates zero revenue.
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- **Use speed controls.** Pause when making big decisions. Speed up during waiting periods.
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## Saving
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The game auto-saves to your browser's localStorage every 60 ticks. You can also:
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- **Export** your save as a JSON file from the Settings page
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- **Import** a previously exported save
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- **Cloud save** by creating an account (requires the backend server)
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Closing the browser tab is safe — when you return, an offline catch-up system simulates what happened while you were away (up to 24 hours).
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## Achievements
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15 achievements track your progression milestones, from training your first model to reaching AGI. Check the Achievements page to see what you've unlocked and what's still ahead.
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