Some interesting developments… | T2 & AI

Take-Two Interactive, the powerhouse behind GTA, has reportedly laid off its head of AI, Luke Dicken, along with what appears to be the entire AI team. Dicken came over through Take-Two’s acquisition of Zynga back in 2022 — a deal worth nearly thirteen billion dollars — and was made head of AI. Now he and his team are gone.
This is significant for several reasons. Take-Two’s CEO Strauss Zelnick has been one of the more vocal skeptics of AI in the gaming industry. He’s talked in earnings calls about how AI will never reach the level of human creativity. So what this looks like is a CEO doing what responsible leaders should do — investing in the technology, giving it a real shot, evaluating its capabilities, and then making the call that it’s not delivering enough value to justify the investment. They had skin in the game. They acquired a company known for its AI work. They gave it resources and runway. And now they’re saying we’re done here.
This isn’t a general layoff where developers across the board are being cut. This is specifically the AI team being let go. And you can’t frame it as “they got what they needed and moved on,” because if AI were being integrated into their pipeline at any meaningful level, you’d still need the people who understand it to run and maintain it. The fact that they’re cutting those positions entirely tells you something about where they landed on the usefulness question.
There’s a real divide in the gaming industry right now. Some developers are fully embracing AI. Others remain deeply skeptical. And what you’re seeing from the ones actually using it in practice is that it’s mostly being used for placeholders — speeding up early development stages before human creativity takes over and does the real work. That’s what happened with Expedition 33, which people tried to label as an AI game when all they did was use it for placeholder assets during development.
Zelnick has publicly stated that GTA VI did not use generative AI in any capacity. When the company behind the biggest game franchise in the world makes that statement and then lays off their entire AI division, that’s a market signal worth paying attention to. We’ll see what trends this sets across the industry.