The Fireworks AI conference in San Francisco
Alistair Barr/Business Insider
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I attended the Fireworks AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday and met the company’s VP of technology and strategy, Rob Ferguson.
He showed me a stunning demo in which an AI model running on Fireworks’ systems created a video game from scratch in about five seconds. (A LOT faster than Claude Code , by the way.)
The game was Asteroids. Watching Rob play it brought childhood memories flooding back.
I used to play Asteroids on my Oric-1 computer. My dad bought it because it was cheaper than a Commodore 64. (Yes, I’m still bitter.) I had to load the game using a cassette tape player, a process that took about 10 minutes.
Now, an AI model can create the game, not just load it, in seconds.
Why does this matter?
Rob explained that speed is crucial if AI agents are going to handle tasks efficiently on our behalf.
Today, working with AI agents often means waiting for them to finish something, occasionally nudging them along. It’s called botsitting , and it’s a drag.
Faster AI models could change that. Instead of waiting around, we could watch agents complete tasks in seconds, without interrupting our flow of work.
That’s exactly what happened with Rob’s demo. Asteroids appeared so quickly that he could immediately ask the AI to improve it, turning the game into 3-D and adding new weapons, including colorful lasers.
He didn’t just use AI to create Asteroids from scratch. He made it better, too. All in about 15 seconds.
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