"SteamGPT" mentions in Valve's code flagged by online sleuth, sparking fears of an AI Steam chatbot that will screw up your support requests and hallucinate anti-cheat

Valve sleuth GabeFollower spotted and shared strings of mined Steam backend code that repeatedly mention "SteamGPT," and the very idea of a Steam riff on ChatGPT has been enough to ignite fears of AI's worst tendencies infecting the biggest store and platform in PC gaming.

With no word from Valve, it does feel like this idea has quickly been exaggerated by an AI-wary internet. SteamGPT appears in several lines of code shared by GabeFollower (who, it's worth pointing out, is not known for simply making things up), attached to phrases like "CreateTask_Request" and "CreateTask_Response" in one screenshot.

There's a real risk of non-programmers misreading code here – assigning meaning and intent to simple labels, for instance – but the location and verbiage of this SteamGPT-adjacent code has not-unreasonably stoked theories about a new tool for Steam support issues. There's a Black Mirror allure to the idea of asking a primitive version of Wheatley, the personality core from Valve's Portal 2, about the status of my Steam refund, for example.

In another screenshot, SteamGPT is tied to "TrustScore" variables. Trust Scores, seemingly the same as Trust Factors, are a matchmaking metric that Valve uses in games like Counter-Strike 2, fueling speculation that SteamGPT would also play into anti-cheat, if only for CS2 specifically as a Valve-controlled testing ground. Valve's explainer on how to "improve my Trust Factor" helps explain the speculation: "All players have to do to improve their matchmaking experience is continue playing Counter-Strike 2 and other Steam games legitimately" (emphasis mine).

Am I counting the days until an LLM AI is an integral part of my Steam browsing experience? No, not over one tweet (and I've reached out to GabeFollower to hopefully talk through their methodology here). For all we know, SteamGPT, while strikingly similar to ChatGPT in its name, could be placeholder, deprecated, or unrelated tech. I've also reached out to Valve for comment.

What we do know for an absolute fact is that Valve founder Gabe Newell is extremely keen on AI integration across disciplines. Half-Life 2 writer Erik Wolpaw also recently shared that a "small group" at Valve is looking into "some AI stuff" for writing, though he described it as just "poking around" for now. Even in 2024, a designer on Valve's Deadlock praised ChatGPT for surfacing a new matchmaking algorithm.

The user response to SteamGPT, whether it's real or imagined, is almost more interesting than the theorized tech. I would bet my house that Valve, like a lot of large tech companies, has tinkered with gen AI and LLMs in some capacity, but I'm currently more hesitant to predict the release of a Steam AI chatbot. That said, I am definitely among the many people who've daydreamed of suplexing whatever hardware hosts the automated support bots for other online stores, so I can safely say I hate the idea.

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