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Too many years ago, I remember slotting a 3.5-inch disk into my PC. With my allowance, Id bought $5 video game design software from a catalog. And as I looked at the terminal, lost without some familiar GUI . . . my coding efforts died. Game design became an abstract concept even as I became a game journalista topic sketched in notebooks, theoretically discussed, critically observed. That was, until I loaded Moonlake AI. With $30 million in funding from investors including Nvidia, AIX, Googles Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and YouTube founder Steve Chen, the 15-person startup founded by two Stanford PhD students dreams of building complete gamesfrom first person shooters to 2D puzzlesvia a single, one-shot prompt. [Screenshot: Moonlake AI] Yes, vibe-coding apps like Claude Code and Replit make it possible to build games, too, but Moonlake is purpose-built for the task. It will never ask you to copy a snippet of code, offers templates to start with if youd like, and has straightforward paths to bring in your own assets, too. It remembers your vision and constantly works to improve it alongside you. For a $40/mo subscription (though you can technically try the platform for free), you type what you want to play, and presto, its coded, bug tested, and appears into existence. Moonlake AI founders Sun Fan-Yun and Sharon Lee [Photo: Moonlake AI] Launching to the public in beta today, the Moonlake AI team knows they arent a one-shot game generator yetwhile I was playtesting my first draft game in minutes, it took hours of going back and forth with the machine to polish it much further. And in fact, the longer term goals for Moonlake AI stretch well beyond the lofty goal of vibe-coding video games. Their larger plan isn’t just to build Moonlake to be more capable, but to leverage the process of video game design itself to build a frontier AI model for the world. Building my game in Moonlake AI Am I the only one who, staring at the prompt, facing this machine that can do anything, suddenly cant think of doing anything? It was this lack of creativity that sunk me the first time Id taken Moonlake for a test-drive. I couldn’t come up with anything unique, so I suggested a 3D dungeon crawler. Despite having no original ideas, I walked through my vision in a multi-paragraph, explicit prompt. It felt too taxing to the system, too grand in scope, and too out of touch with what I imagined. My prompt was realized as one big broken room filled with pill shaped characters and no simple way forward. When I recount this story to Moonlake AI cofounder Sun Fun-Yun, he suggested starting smaller. Focusing on smaller interactions and building from there. (Even though he shared a few single-shot projects that hed made in one day, including this Centipede clone and postapocalyptic simulator). So I did the human work, and racked my brain for days before landing on a new concept: A miniature chef runs back and forth with a giant ice cream cone, catching falling scoops of ice cream. They stack and get harder and harder to balance. From here, I could pursue all sorts of game loops, depending on what felt fun about it (maybe you got points for each scoop, maybe some flavor combinations introduced bonuses, maybe ice cream scoops you didn’t catch got in the way). But for now, I focused on this simple introduction. [Screenshot: Moonlake AI] I typed this request into the prompt on the left side of the interface. And much like ChatGPT, Moonlake got to work, praising me for my brilliant creative idea, and then breaking down the tasks that would need to be taken to bringing it to life. Moonlake offered me an estimate of 1520 minutes to finish the job. Then it launched: Faster than I could possibly parse, the system created and worked through a checklist of to-dos. It needed to create graphic meshes, wobble mechanics, and sprites for my graphics. It researched topics it didnt readily understand. A mix of plain language explanations, and then hundreds of lines of code, populated into the chatbox, expanding and then consolidating away from my eyes. [Video: courtesy of the author] I was impressed by the decisions it made on its own, not just breaking down necessary tasks for a minimum viable product, but introducing a bouncy animation when the ice cream hit the cone (a detail I figured Id add in a polishing pass later). The system even said it was loading th game, and testing itspotting and squashing a few bugsbefore that magical button appeared in the big center box making up most of the UI: Play Game. The moment reminded me of the first time I tried gen AI; this actually worked! Sort of! [Video: courtesy of the author] My first draft felt something out of the early PC gaming era. My chef was too big, cone was too small. And the ice creams wouldn’t stack. But gosh, it got so much right about my simple pitch. The core vision was there. Ice cream fell at just the right pace from the sky. The scale of the entire scene felt right. The controls were all mapped without me needing to explain which key should do what. My chef . . . was something of a white blob stuck to a cone. He needed work. But Moonlake even did a decent job of creating a white tile kitchen background, with subtle sundaes printed upon it like murals. [Video: courtesy of the author] From there, I began lecturing the machine to fix the ice cream so it stacked. That created other issues. Ice cream started stacking, but would fall with any movement. Negotiating the feel led me to try all sorts of new prompts, and even as it failed and failed again, I started recognizing how the AI was translating ideas like stickiness into its own annotated code. Hours of casual updates in a tab in my browser followed. Fixing the physics of the scoops was vexing. I ended up in a loop of not quite solved problems. [Video: courtesy of the author] But I also asked for a new chef, this one with a proper, giant hat, with little sweat marks poking out every time he changed directions. This entire idea, Moonlake nailed out of the gate. My exact preferred aesthetic? No. But it captured the vibe. I found myself pleased, but also realizing that polishing this experience into something that felt delightful would take a lot of work. Another day? A week? It was tough to tell. The next morning, in a final ditch effort (I did have an article to file!), I decided to add a bunch of my lingering requests in one final push just to see what Moonlake could do. I wanted big multiplier scoring, a Kawaii graphic upgrade, and a few more fixes to my vexing scoop physics. It was unfair to request all these updates at once, and almost sure to break something. Fifteen minutes of coding followed, while I grabbed a coffee. What I returned to? Largely my brief! A few new issues around ice cream slippage! A game over screen I didnt ask for! But, at last, a true gamebuilt for about 950 of my 1,500 monthly creditsand published for you to try with a button press. (Moonlake is still determining pricing on extra credits.) [Video: courtesy of the author] Creating the frontier model Like a lot of AI companies, Moonlake is only charging customers its cost of computingwhich is why the base subscription comes with a limited amount of credits to run the AI. Everyone believes that cost should go over time, which could either widen Moonlake’s margins on subscriptions, or simply be reinvested to make the platform more capable. But only when I ask how Moonlake trained its model do I really learn how it all works, and to some extent, why this video game generator even exists as a business. Moonlake is an ever-growing AI model. However, its also really a video game building agent that takes your task and coordinates it with several specialized third party AI models that might handle anything from physics to asset generation. And its also growing into something even more ambitious as a result of sitting on top of so much existing AI power. Ours is an orchestrator that learns to fuse these modalities together, says Fan-Yun. And over time, our model can actually be more and more capable and incorporate other models’ capabilities into our own. But thats only the start of the strategy. As you vibecode in Moonlake, you are creating your own video game. You are also training Moonlakes own frontier modelwhat falls into a very hyped segment of world models or what Moonlake qualifies as multimodal modelsthat dont just rearrange words and concepts LLMs, but have a deep understanding of what the world is, how it works, and how all of its surfaces and touchpoints respond to inputs across physical space. That means when I correct Moonlake, saying an ice cream scoop should stack and stick atop another scoop of ice cream, it effectively learns that scoops of ice cream stick atop one another. Multiply that across millions of highly specific user requests, and as Moonlake AI cofounder Sharon Lee explains, game design could provide a perfect training loop to feed countless data points about how we expect the world to work into these world models. No, many or even most games don’t operate on real world physics which would translate 1:1 in some simulation. But in some cases they do, and Moonlake could extract such real physics for their own simulations. Furthermore, the founders believe the aforementioned causal relationships it’s mapping will still add a clarity to world models that’s otherwise hard to pin down. There’s a gap between large language models today and semantics they understand, versus actually building [a] world out, says Lee. And they believe that gap can be closed with more, intentional data. Today, researchers are trying to get these world inputs by renting Airbnbs and scanning the rooms with lasers, but that is relatively static information that is hard to scale. AI can also analyze videos to draw conclusions, but those lack the sharpness of human contextualization. As for video games? If you train a model on just a lot of Fortnite data, you know that you’re not going to really generalize to real world data, says Lee. [Our] data will just scale exponentially compared to hand curated data or collected data. Even Googles Genie AI can generate a slew of amazing 3D worlds with some interactivity, but the interactions they afford are superficial at best. I think the difference is sort of observing the world as it is, versus observing and understanding the world with causality, says Fan-Yun. And so causality is what Moonlake is after. Gaming is a task for V1 of Moonlakes model because the user feedback loop can teach it so much, but in the future, the team imagines applying a more mature version of this model to other fields. They see opportunities to train the next generation of robotics or improving driverless cars. Lee says theyve even fielded calls from manufacturing companies, that imagine understanding the human side of the equationcould help identify human factors issues in product design and assembly line production. The challenge, of course, is building Moonlake well enough that it produces games up to the standards of gamers, and that it continues investing in the product, so that people can restyle the entire graphics package with a button press, or easily export these games to sell on PC, iOS, or any other platform they would like. These ideas are all on the road map. But for now, Moonlake AI offers an accessible trip into the vibe-coding era, all through the lens of fun.
Category:
E-Commerce
Gabriela Flax spent the first part of her career working in tech as a product manager. And while every day was different and varied, there were aspects of it that were causing her burnout. “I’ve always really enjoyed the product marketing aspect of my work,” she says. “I really like talking to end-users about ‘Hey, this is how this thing helps you’ and how to articulate that.” However, she wasn’t able to work on it as much as she would have liked. At the same time, Flax was in her 20s, living in London, and had stopped drinking alcohol. She began posting her journey in social media, talking about bars and places that were non-alcohol related. Flax recalls, “The more and more I did that, I started having brands reaching out to me saying, Hey, we’d love to partner with you. We have this event coming upwould you come and speak about what it’s like living in London in your 20s and not drinking?” By weekends and nights, Flax was organizing events and creating a lot of user-generated content for brands. She was able to exercise her creative muscle and passion for marketing, all while getting paid for it. Eventually, she left her tech job to pursue what is now commonly known as a portfolio career: where individuals make a living from multiple projects and streams of income. Today, she continues to do events and marketing for non-alcoholic beverage brands, alongside her career-coaching business, Pivot School. Making money through multiple means is not a new thing. But in a landscape where side-hustles, gig work, and freelance contracts have become the norm and at times necessary, Flax’s career trajectory is becoming more and more common. A solution to burnout Flax pursued a portfolio career because she felt burned out in her full-time tech job. The same can be said for Anna MacKenzie, who had the same feeling about being a founder. After spending a career in beauty and tech, MacKenzie cofounded a successful, award-winning podcast and events business. But as a “multi-passionate generalist,” MacKenzie eventually felt burned out. “When you’re a founder, you have to pour absolutely everything into a brand and business,” she says. “I really felt this desire to do multiple things. The reason that I pivoted into a portfolio career, which I didn’t have the language for at the time, was that I was looking for something that was halfway between being an employee and being a founder.” A portfolio career, MacKenzie explains, allows her to maintain the freedom and flexibility and control of her earning potential. However, unlike being a founder, it didn’t require “the responsibility of building a brand, building a business, and having contractors or a team.” Today, MacKenzie’s work setup spans advising early-stage beauty startups on how to get into major retailers like Sephora, mentoring, and selling digital products that guide people in building these types of careers. She also does fractional work for tech companies, which is when a high-level professional provides their expertise to a company and joins a team on a temporary, contract, or project basis. This is slightly different than a consultant, who typically plays more of an advisory role and isn’t often embedded in a team. But as Fast Company covered in a previous story about this trend, pursuing it can have the trappings of hustle culture. Rice University management professor Scott Sonenshein said that self-employed portfolio careerists can have trouble setting boundaries when it comes to workload. He explained, “You might feel like you always need to be working because theres more incremental money to be earned for taking on additional gigs, as opposed to what you might be doing if you were working full-time for a traditional employer.” Being able to maintain a sense of control For Tracie Sponenberg, preventing burnout is about being intentional with her schedule and work environment. The former HR executive coach, keynote speaker, and consultant is having what she calls “one of the busiest months of her life.” Yet she feels nowhere close to burning out. For a few days, she can take a trip to South Carolina and work while overlooking the ocean. Things like that, she explains, “really help.” Like Flax, Sponenberg experienced burnout during her corporate career (in Sponenberg’s case, in the aftermath of the pandemic). But since she’s been on her own, she’s been able to stay away from it. The decision to do this work, she explains, “and whether I succeed or fail is on me.” That sense of control, Sponenberg says, is what makes that feel like “huge relief” rather than a heavy burden. For Flax, that sense of control has been extremely crucial to sustaining a portfolio career. She is aware that what hers looks like right now can change and evolve in the future. “I think that’s the fun part,” she says. “If one piece works today, because you’re the one who is in charge of it, you also have the capacity to turn that part of the engine off.” If there are certain activities that no longer resonate, she explains, “I don’t have to ask permission for someone to stop doing that.” Engineering a form of stability Like any entrepreneurial venture, pursuing a this kind of employment does come with risks. For MacKenzie, this was familiar territory as a founder. But when she decided to pivot into a portfolio career, she landed a lucrative contract, thanks to her extensive network that she’d built during her corporate career and previous business. Because of that, she was able to take her time to experiment and explore with what she wanted to do next. Having that kind of financial security without the stability of a full-time job is something that MacKenzie continues to prioritize. “To this day, I’ve always had one reliable income stream. Whether that’s a client or a product, I know we’ll bring in enough revenue to cover my life,” she says. Having this structure in place can also help prevent individuals from putting themselves in a position where they’re constantly selling, which can be a recipe for burnout. While Flax asserts that no contract roles are perfectly safe, being a freelancer where you’re having to pitch your services every single day is quite different from being a contractor with two fractional jobs who do a little bit of writing on the side. What it takes to succeed For some, this can also be a temporary arrangement. It can also be a way to build a career around a lifestyle change. MacKenzie believes that it’s a structure that new parents can benefit from, especially for those who are highly skilled. “There’s an inherent flexibility in terms of how you design and structure your career,” she says. She also believes that it’s a strategic way for people to scale their careers outside of just client work. But it’s not an arrangement that is suitable for everyone, at least for the long term. Flax says that she has seen many different archetypes try out portfolio careers. And in that time, she’s seen those with similar personality types and motivations both thrive and struggle. The willingness to improve your risk tolerance One of the key things that she believes will be crucial is one’s appetite for risk. You need to be someone who “finds the process of instability as something that they can gamify [and] conquer,” Flax explains. When people tell her that they want to pursue this path, she encourages them go ahead only if “not doing so will eat away at you.” In many instances, this also requires you to put yourself out there, network, and build your personal brand. “If that’s not a line of activity that you’re willing to go down, it’s not impossible, but it’s going to make it harder,” she says. If you don’t have a high tolerance for risk but still want to go down this path, Flax says, “you’ve got to want to strengthen that muscle.” And that can start when you’re still in your corporate job. Maybe you volunteer for a project that has the potential to fail big. Or perhaps you look for micro examples in your personal life where you can get more exposure to risks. Alternatively, you can just take the jump and see how you react. Flax suggests, however, having a backup plan you can return to if you do decide that it isn’t for you. Self-awareness and sustainability Ultimately, maintaining a portfolio career for the long term requires a good sense of self-awareness. Sponenberg, for example, knows what she’s good at (and what’s she’s not). When she started her business, she knew that cold calling and traditional business development wasn’t her forte. “What I do know how to do is help people and be really useful and offer advice,” she explains. And due to her multi-decade HR career in manufacturing and distribution, companies came to her for help. So she worked hard to be the go-to person for them anytime they had a people issue. Flax also says that understanding your working style and tailoring your portfolio career around that is also important. This type of structure, she says is “great for people who are multi-hyphenates, who have so different interests and want to exercise those different parts. But be very conscious if context switching is going to cause you whiplash,” she says. Flax recommends that at the start, you should be very conscious about how many components you introduce. This way, “you don’t feel overwhelmed by the ecosystem that you’ve built yourself,” she explains. “It can have two pieces to it that scratch very different parts of your brain,” she says. “It doesn’t need to look like a web.” Accepting that it’s not for everyone And if it turns out that it’s not something you’re able (or want) to sustain, Flax asserts that there’s no shame in going back to a nine-to-five. “It is so okay to have a corporate job that pays your bills that you enjoy, ” she says. “I think there’s a bit of an anti-corporate or anti nine-to-five or anti-traditional work rhetoric that’s going on right now, largely driven by the freelance portfolio career self-employment world. It is not for everyone, and that is so okay.” “It is one of the many ways to think about work. It is not the only way. My personal opinion is that yes, we are moving more towards a decentralized type of work. Having a portfolio career may, in the long term or the medium term, serve you well in that way. But I don’t think in our lifetime, there’s a reality in which no one has a corporate job anymore.”
Category:
E-Commerce
If you stop by the as-is section at one of Ikeas U.S. stores, you might now find a vintage table from the 1980s. The company recently started accepting older products in its Buy Back & Resell program, which gives customers store credit for bringing back used items, and then offers them for sale to other customers. Since launching as a pilot in the U.S. five years ago, the programstill the only one of its kind at a major furniture retailerhas steadily expanded, underscoring the demand for circular options. The program is our opportunity to bring our products back into the store from our customers to keep them out of landfill, says Mardi Ditze, sustainability manager for Ikea U.S. [Photo: Ikea] U.S. stores recently started taking back 700 additional SKUs through the program, from vintage furniture to glassware. Last year, customers brought back 14,700 products, growing from 8,000 in 2023. Most resold within 48 to 72 hours. The brands resale program is also growing globally. Ingka Group, the largest Ikea franchise that operates stores in 31 countries, sourced nearly 690,000 used Ikea products for resale last year. Part of the appeal, especially in the current economy, is the fact that the secondhand products have a built-in discount. We’ve always had a focus on creating value for money for customers, and this strengthens our low-price offer, says Karen Pflug, chief sustainability officer for Ingka Group. Our research shows that even though we feel we’re affordable, it can still be a barrier for some people. So the secondhand offers a whole new level of affordability. [Photo: Ikea] Selling secondhand products doesnt cannibalize the companys sales of new products. Instead, its helping bring in some new customers who are looking for lower-priced options. Customers who bring in their own used products to resell typically spend more than the value of the voucher that they get for the return. “Our experience has been that when a customer comes and successfully has a buyback resale transaction, has a store credit in their hand, they are likely thinking about what their next purchase is going to be,” says Ditze. “That transaction could happen as soon as that day, and that gift card gets applied to the purchase that they were thinking about doing.” Ikea also offers a peer-to-peer resale option in a handful of countries, with plans to expand this year. Customers who want to resell something scan their product with Ikea’s app, and then automatically get price recommendations, measurements, descriptions, assembly instructions, and professional product photos for their listing, helping remove some of the friction of posting an ad yourself on another platform like eBay or Facebook Marketplace. Sellers also get either cash or a 15% digital refund card that they can use at Ikea. Left: a page from a 1979 Ikea catalog with the Billy bookcase. Right: a newer iteration of the Billy, ca. 2022. [Photos: Ikea] The work is part of Ikea’s larger effort to become a circular company, meaning that it keeps products and materials in use as long as possible, shifts to recycled and renewable materials, and eliminates waste throughout the supply chain. Inter Ikea, the part of the brand that handles design, is also beginning to redesign products for longevity. The classic Billy bookcase, for example, now has more resilient materials and snap-in attachments instead of nails in the back, so it can be disassembled and reassembled more quicklyand more easily be resold and moved. Ikea has also long offered free parts to repair products if a screw is lost, and sofa covers to help furniture stay in use longer if it gets a stain. Some stores in Europe have tested repair programs for resold items. Ikea is actively finding new recycling options for when products do wear out completelyor if they can’t easily be resold because of hygiene reasons. The company invested in a mattress recycling startup, for example, which can harvest parts from springs to foam for use in new mattresses. And by 2030, Ikea is aiming for a third of the wood in its products to be recycled. “One part of it is creating a closed-loop circular stream for ourselves because of resource materials coming in,” says Pflug. “But the other is just doing the right thing from a circular economy point of view.” [Photo: Ikea] On the resale front, Ikea is tapping into momentum that alread existed. In Europe, Pflug says that Ikea products make up around 9% of the secondhand furniture market. But the company’s efforts could help nudge more people to take the time to give items a second life rather than throwing them out. Other brands could follow the same approach. “Customers already see the value of our products but also the value of secondhand furniture in general, and are doing it themselves,” says Pflug. “So if you want to have a part of that conversation and a part of that market, you have to make sure you’re being accessible and affordable and removing the barriers and pain points for people to do it. I think that’s when you’ll then get the demand.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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