ilan benjamin (@ilanibenjamin) header
ilan benjamin (@ilanibenjamin) profile picture

leading growth @AIDungeon & @playVoyage. previously: Hollywood guy, romance novelist, combat soldier

Berlin, Germany
Joined August 2012
Photo by ilan benjamin (@ilanibenjamin)Photo by ilan benjamin (@ilanibenjamin)Photo by ilan benjamin (@ilanibenjamin)Photo by ilan benjamin (@ilanibenjamin)Photo by ilan benjamin (@ilanibenjamin)Photo by ilan benjamin (@ilanibenjamin)Photo by ilan benjamin (@ilanibenjamin)Photo by ilan benjamin (@ilanibenjamin)Photo by ilan benjamin (@ilanibenjamin)Photo by ilan benjamin (@ilanibenjamin)
For the past 8 months, we have been building a secret universe of fictional characters on TikTok. Now, the secret is out. Thank you to every brilliant cast & team member who made this possible. We're just getting started. fastcompany.com/90682632/thi…
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Congrats to the whole Pocket FM team. Building Sherpa as their Director of AI Products was a thrilling chapter. So pumped for its big public reveal!
Introducing Sherpa: the most advanced fiction writing AI We accelerated from $250M in ARR to $500M because Sherpa helped increase content production by 1200% in 1 year Sherpa was trained on 5.5B hours of playtime with minute by minute dynamic retention data. 550K+ creators have produced 2.6M hours of content annualised using it Pocket FM is like Netflix for audio-only dramas, with our own pool of one-person studios. 10% of eligible writers on Pocket FM make >$200K One blockbuster produced >$100M in revenue 3 writers have become millionaires in <2 yrs We built Sherpa to enable anyone to make >$1M by writing world-class fiction stories: 1. The Idea: Drop a 1-2 sentence concept. Sherpa interrogates it like a veteran editor on tension, stakes, and psychology 2. World & Characters: It builds out the complete lore, tone, and character psychologies 3. Sub-Plot planning: Breaks the premise into arcs, arcs into episodes, and episodes into scenes 4. Scene-by-Scene Generation: Outlines and drafts entire episodes, with you able to steer, rewrite, or override anytime 5. Editorial Review: Stress-tests every draft for pacing, engagement drop-offs, prose, and coherence before it locks 6. One-Tap Production: Pick a voice, convert to audio drama, and publish directly to Pocket FM’s millions of listeners 7. Global Scale & Monetization: Revenue-share on performance, with automatic localization so you earn across international markets Test Sherpa for free here: pocketfm.com/sherpa _____________________________________________ Generic LLMs fail at serialized fiction because they lack a long-horizon narrative reward function. Sherpa solves this through three core technical leaps: 1. Narrative World Model (State Tracking & Retrieval): Context windows degrade over long runs. Sherpa constructs an evolving semantic knowledge graph tracking character states, secrets, and plot dependencies. High-speed retrieval surfaces exact context on demand, maintaining zero continuity decay across hundreds of episodes 2. Hierarchical Story Planner: When writing a 500-episode story like Naruto, you need to plan 100s of sub plots. Rather than generating linearly, Sherpa decomposes narrative across discrete levels: season -> arc -> sequence -> episode -> scene. Rather than generating everything upfront, like a generic LLM, Sherpa uses progressive planning and dynamic replanning. As the story evolves, it identifies what changed, traces the downstream impact, and replans only the affected parts. 3. Prose Engine (Trained on series' retention data): LLMs write robotically, but serial fiction needs emotion, tension, pacing, and dialogue that sounds like real people. Sherpa's Prose Engine was designed specifically for storytelling. It was built on 1B+ tokens of Pocket's own stories, trained by learning from what listeners engage with, where they drop off, and what keeps them hooked. Feedback is taken from specialized evaluator models that measure every scene against a 40-item checklist. (Evaluator models were benchmarked against human reviewers and matched them 80–90% of the time.) _______________________________________________ Owning distribution and creation puts us in a very unique spot. More shows -> More data -> Sherpa becomes better -> more creator success -> more creators -> more shows Pocket FM has already seen one $100M IP. I believe Sherpa will soon lead to dozens of single-person studios creating billion-dollar shows. Most people are scared of AI but I think it'll unlock more human creativity, help creators earn more, and bring the next great IPs to life. This will create millions of jobs and new income streams.
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ilan benjamin retweeted
People die in crazy ways playing Voyage. Animating them = pure cinema. Watch a 24/7 stream of Voyage deaths. voyage.io/stream
🤖 Made with AI
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ilan benjamin retweeted
i trained the fly to solve rubiks cube is there anything this little guy can't do?
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we're pretty quiet but AI Dungeon makes several times more than that, people often discount text, but at its heart it's not about the text it's about storytelling, and storytelling is the most fundamental art known to man, don't underestimate it's power!
wow this app makes $200k/mo. it is so text heavy that i thought it was too tldr to do well, then just saw the stats..
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Can't remember the last time an advertisement hit me like this one did. Kudos! Been 40 years for me since I rolled the ol' d20 but it's such a cherished memory of youth.
Introducing Voyage, the first platform to fulfill the promise of AI games. Voyage lets you one-shot an entire world with characters that feel alive, memory that lasts forever, and the structure and challenge needed to make an actually fun game. From the creators of AI Dungeon, the next generation of AI games is here.
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I got to try Voyage in beta and the experience reminds me so much of playing D&D at the table. Very impressed by how well the AI Dungeon Master is able to keep track of all the events and the world etc
Introducing Voyage, the first platform to fulfill the promise of AI games. Voyage lets you one-shot an entire world with characters that feel alive, memory that lasts forever, and the structure and challenge needed to make an actually fun game. From the creators of AI Dungeon, the next generation of AI games is here.
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Working on @playVoyage with @nickwalton00 and the whole team behind @aidungeon has been unbelievably exciting. Watch our DND-inspired trailer for Voyage, a game that redefines roleplay in the AI era. Play it here: voyage.io/
Introducing Voyage, the first platform to fulfill the promise of AI games. Voyage lets you one-shot an entire world with characters that feel alive, memory that lasts forever, and the structure and challenge needed to make an actually fun game. From the creators of AI Dungeon, the next generation of AI games is here.
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ilan benjamin retweeted
Voyage is the first AI-native RPG platform and signals the future of the $47b RPG market. Built on our World Engine, nearly 60% of players call it revolutionary. Backed by @NFX, @Griffin_GP, @AIFuturesFund, Midjourney, @AlbumVC + @Roblox execs. @TechCrunch has the story 👇
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ilan benjamin retweeted
The war is over. The living are home. And for the first time in two years, our Jewish nation can breathe a little. This day belongs to the people; to the parents who lived in sleepless prayer, to the soldiers who walked into the fire, to the families who buried their children and still stood to welcome others home. It belongs to those who never stopped fighting— with hope, with faith, with words, with love of this land and its people. To those who were attacked for standing with truth. To those who carried hope when it felt impossible. To those who gave their lives for this light to keep shining. You are the reason we survived. You are the reason the light returned. Before the speeches, before the credits— remember this: it wasn’t power alone that brought them home. It was people. It was you. Am Yisrael Chai. ✡
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The incredible Bari Weiss is now the editor-in-chief of CBS News. Inspiring proof that even in dark times, courage, conviction, and truth, can still bring light.
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My cousin Daniel Pearl understood that journalism was dangerous. To such an extent, he risked his life and lost it. @bariweiss understands that risk. She dared to build @TheFP in a culture dominated by fear & groupthink. The lesson here: Dare. Build. Tell the truth.
Breaking News: Paramount is buying The Free Press for $150 million and appointing Bari Weiss, the news site's co-founder, as the editor in chief of CBS News. nyti.ms/3IL9VZO
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I am proud to have been one of many who contributed to The Free Press. I am proud that together we told Danny’s story. 2 years after October 7, this news just might reignite my idealism. The culture is healing. Congratulations Bari & the whole team. thefp.com/p/daniel-pearl-cou…
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When you watch a movie, you forget it's a movie. It feels real to you. Hume is the 1st AI you forget is AI.
Now live at demo.hume.ai We're persuaded by emotion not content. This tech will be so powerful that I won't be surprised if the EU regulates what you can do with it. Try it out
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22 years ago my cousin was murdered. Before my Bar Mitzvah. He made me who I am. You are remembered, Danny, and loved.
22 years ago - on February 1, 2002 - American journalist Daniel Pearl was brutally murdered by a terror group in Pakistan. Weeks later, a videotape of his beheading was released. His final words on earth were "My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish." There's an evil in our world that preys on Jews. We remember you, Daniel. We carry your memory and refuse to cower or hide. We are proudly Jewish and fighting for the right of Jews to be free and safe. May Daniel's memory forever be a blessing.
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My family name is Lubliner. It means from Lublin. A city in Poland next to Majdanek, a concentration camp so intact, it could be up & operating within 24 hours. Most of my family died there. I remember them today.
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Today is my nephew’s Bar Mitzvah. With so many hostages still in Gaza & Jews suffering anti-semitic attacks around the world, it almost feels wrong to celebrate. But it’s not wrong. Jewish joy IS perseverance. Mazel Tov, Jordan.
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I have loved ones from Kibbutz Be’eri. I am a Jew from the Bay Area. The hate towards us EVERYWHERE is palpable.
Replying to @SFJCRC
WATCH: A San Francisco Jewish man bravely shares his experiences with antisemitism after losing five family members at Kibbutz Be'eri, including two kidnapped by Hamas, only to be met with boos and jeers from anti-Israel activists.
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It’s obvious why so many people on the left are silent about the conclusive NYT piece documenting the mass rape and sexual torture by Hamas: Because it explodes their simple fantasy that Hamas are noble “resistance” fighters and not the terrorists monsters they truly are.
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Do I care that Bradley Cooper isn’t Jewish? No. It’s a great performance (if a bit over-the-top with the cigarettes). Jewish people are not, by and large, so easily triggered. No one complained about Daniel Craig saying “Don’t f*** with the Jews.” It was cool. Who cares.
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Main reason most Jews aren’t complaining about Maestro? We have more important life-threatening causes to fight for right now. If he were alive today, Leonard Bernstein would be with us. His history with Israel: mjhnyc.org/blog/leonard-bern…
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Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic nose is not the problem with Maestro. The problem is the reduction of Leonard Bernstein’s identity to his sexual preferences.
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The movie has some beautiful scenes (like the shadow of the conductor looming over his wife or the concert in the church). But you don’t walk away with the essence of Bernstein’s musical genius. The focus is on his lovers. Why?
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