Take-Two's former head of AI, Dr Luke Dicken, has called the current AI investment boom "one of the largest misallocations of capital through the system that assures us it's the most efficient way of allocating capital."

Dicken, who led Take-Two Interactive's AI team from January 2025 until the unit was cut this April, delivers that verdict ahead of his session at PGC Nordics in Helsinki on October 20th and 21st. His message to studios: be pragmatic, and if you haven't started chasing AI productivity yet, don't.

What does Dicken say is wrong with the numbers?

He points to Anthropic, whose investors expect a flotation at $2 trillion or more this month. "There is no business math that allows you to get to that number," he says. His criticism targets what he calls "the big tech capitalism of it," not the underlying technology.

The bigger cost for games, he argues, is attention. "All of the oxygen is being sucked out of the room by billion-dollar press departments, more so than by actual innovation," he says.

He also questions the infrastructure race in concrete terms. North America has roughly 16 gigawatts of AI-specific compute today, with around 310 gigawatts planned. "ChatGPT, Claude and all these guys came out of that 16 gigawatts," he says. "So why do we need so much more stuff built?"

Where does generative AI earn its keep?

Dicken is not anti-AI. He spent a decade at Zynga building its applied AI group before joining Take-Two, and uses a food analogy to frame fit: the industry has room for both Michelin-star restaurants and McDonald's, and most studios need a mix.

His shortlist of sensible applications:

• Performance marketing, partly because "a lot of that already was kind of human-authored slop."
• Prototyping, with one rule: "Don't ever ship it."
• LLMs as filler between structured systems, handling the moments "players do that we haven't fully thought about" — not as "the core and heart and soul of the system."

Production code worries him most. "I think there is a potential state where we're going to find that we're shoving a lot of asbestos into the walls here," he says. "And then we're going to be like, that was a terrible idea, we need to rip it all out."

What happens to junior hiring?

Dicken's first major fear is headcount. He borrows a line from Cory Doctorow: AI isn't good enough to do your job, but it is good enough to convince your boss it can. Junior roles are being hit hardest, and cutting them makes for good earnings calls — but it leaves the industry without its next generation of seniors.

"You hire juniors because you want seniors," he says. After 40 to 50 years, games is facing its first major retirement wave while "choosing to invest less in the next generation. That seems unwise."

How exposed are AI pipelines to price hikes?

His second fear is pipeline dependency. He cites the Uber playbook: cheap prices to build the habit, then prices go up. One studio told him: "We're building this and it's sending stuff off to Claude, but what happens when Claude starts ratcheting its prices up?"

His own estimate — which he admits is an edgy one — is something like a 20x increase once subsidies end.

Should studios sit out the AI race?

Dicken's advice to cautious studios is the part that gets him "yelled at by the pro-AI people." He compares the current moment to the industry's transition to 3D, and expects AI tooling to settle into standards within three to five years, much as Maya and Blender did.

"People that are chasing the productivity conversation are just running on a treadmill," he says. The real opportunity lies in new player experiences — what the technology lets studios do for players that they simply couldn't do before.

"If you stay on the sidelines right now, my view is stay on the sidelines," he says. Dicken expands on this at PGC Nordics in Helsinki on October 20th and 21st, in a session titled Surviving the AI Hype Cycle - A Pragmatist's View — a useful signal of how at least one former AAA AI lead reads the market's direction.