The head of Interactive Take-Two’s AI team has apparently been laid off, along with an undisclosed number of other employees working on AI operations at the company that owns Rockstar Games, 2K and Zynga. The reorganization comes despite CEO Strauss Zelnick saying the parent publisher is “actively adopting generative AI.”
“It’s truly disappointing to have to share with you that my time at T2 – and that of my team – has come to an end,” Luke Dicken, who became Take-Two’s head of AI in early 2025 after a decade at Zynga, wrote on LinkedIn on Thursday. He added: “We’ve been developing cutting-edge technology to support game development for 7 years now. These people know how to combine innovation and new problem-solving approaches with strong product design skills to create systems that empower people throughout the development workflow.”
Much of Take-Two’s AI team appears to have been built from Zynga’s existing applied AI department. Take-Two acquired the mobile gaming company in 2022 for $12.7 billion, but the partnership struggled to generate new hits. Many of Dicken’s industrial colleagues shared their shock at the news of the layoffs.
Take-Two declined to comment.
Last month, the company tried to distance itself from tools like The genius of Google after its stock price took a hit from investors worried that generative AI would allow anyone to create world-class games without massive development teams. “Genie is early in its iteration at this point and trying to make a comparison to a game engine is really – they’re not even in the same ballpark. Genie is not a game engine,” said Karl Slatoff, president of Take-Two. said at the time.
While CEO Straus Zelnick has repeatedly stated cold water on the idea that genAI could make the next Grand Theft Autohe recently confirmed that the company is fully invested in exploring how to integrate technology into game development. “Right now, we are actively adopting generative AI,” he said. during a recent investor call. “We have hundreds of pilots and implementations across our business, including in our studios, and we see opportunities to gain efficiencies, reduce costs and create the opportunity to do what digital technology has always enabled, which is to make mundane tasks easier and less relevant, freeing our creators to focus on the more interesting tasks of creating great entertainment.”
But the industry’s adoption of AI has also triggered a backlash among stakeholders. Nvidia took a big hit in March when it revealed how its upcoming DLSS 5 graphics technology would neglect NPCs in popular games. Even Arc Raiderswhich sold millions of copies and received critical acclaim despite genAI-voiced NPCs, recently began replacing those. artificial voices with real human recordings.