Meet CTW’s Chief AI Officer, Chin Tzulin
Path to CTW?
This is our series on the team working at CTW.
Today, we’ll spend some time with our incredible Chief AI Officer. His achievements in helping the company blow up are undeniable. But he’s not settling for success and growth. He wants to change the entire gaming industry. Chin-san has an AI-driven vision!
What convinced you to join CTW?
Why did I join CTW? So for me, I'd already gained a lot of great experience at other big companies — Rakuten, Line, places like that... I was at the point in my career where I wanted to focus more on building up a business and creating something really valuable. I wanted to create things which were good for the world, that would bring joy to a lot of people. That was my motivation. And I saw that potential in CTW. They looked like a startup with big plans… plans to make an impact on the world.
Initially, the main reason I considered the job was because Liao-san invited me to join. I know him well, I knew he was a top guy in the business. But the most important thing for me was to figure out what CTW’s business was actually doing. Looking at their plans, not just to make games, but to build something huge and original in the industry, experimenting with new technologies and ways of working in order to become No 1... I thought that was a great opportunity.
It got me excited.
Before I joined this company, I just saw myself as an engineer, working as part of a big organization. I knew how to build programs, how to build products... but here at CTW, I saw that they were asking me to build something much more valuable.
We were being asked to make the heart of the company, or maybe the brain. What we built would define how CTW grew, in which direction, and where it would ultimately go in the future.
That's exactly what I was looking for.
So how did those ideas turn out?
Well, I can give you a few snapshots because so much has happened in 2 years.
The first thing I did when I came in was to help Liao-san build the data pipeline. When I joined, the data pipeline wasn't really strong or useful to the company. If you don't capture the data in real-time, it will be lost, or what you're looking at is badly delayed and useless to your real-time needs.
CTW needs to make decisions really fast. So if there is a delay in the data, then we’re losing incredibly valuable information. Lost information also leads to poor decision-making quality, so I saw that we needed to fix that.
Now, we use our data in so many functions to train models essential to our marketing, game ops, game development, and more.
I’m currently working on a project to completely overhaul our creative management capabilities. The system is really, really exciting because it’s changing how we think about creative elements. Once it’s done, it will set a new standard for the games industry as a whole.?
Because, you know, a typical game company, they manage their creative output with a team of illustrators and modelers, who maybe use an interface and their own database. But in our system, we’re building an AI management system that lets you auto-generate what you need.?
So let's say you want to make a sword for a character, you just have to tell the AI model, make me this kind of sword and it will immediately make what you want. It will use examples of what we’ve already made and stored in the data warehouse and create hundreds of variations of the most popular assets, all in real-time.
It's like the AI banner generation tool you’ve written about with Xiaolan but for creative assets.
Things like this make me believe that CTW will soon have the best creative generation capabilities in Japan by far.
And in the future, our platform can evolve to transform the browser experience into something people never thought possible. Imagine browser VR and AR, all available on a single gaming platform!
That's what the future holds for us and I think we’ll be able to push the envelope even further.
Outside of the technology, what makes CTW unique?
So for me the biggest milestones in the company have been the crazy growth. When I joined, we had just about 30 team members. That was at the start of 2020. Now, we have over 200. I'm proud that the tech team has been able to bring so much to the business and help the company grow really fast.
The leadership early on took the time to explain their vision to us, giving us the big picture view, showing how we would first be Number 1 in Japan, then Number 1 in the world. They hoped that everyone on the tech team could hold onto that vision and also pass it down to our team as we grew bigger and bigger.
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This was my first time in a position of leadership at this level and I wasn’t a storyteller.
So it was difficult for me to learn this skill. But after we began to make bigger and bigger achievements, like training our recommendation model for the marketing team, gaining more and more trust from the leadership, it became much easier for me to show the entire tech team how that vision was going to go, to help them see it and work towards it together.
Today, everyone is on the same page. We can all see the goal and we all 100% believe we'll get there. It's an exciting opportunity to build a new way of doing business with a data and AI focus.
What’s your own vision going forward?
I want to change the way people work in the gaming industry. Since working here and learning about the video games business, my first goal is to make everyone's lives easier and better. I want to show that every company can operate like CTW.
Game development can be more fun than it is right now. People don't just have to continue with the traditional, ineffective, crunch-time way of doing things. There's so much that can be changed in the operational environment if you're building tools that match and support your goals.
So for me, personally, I think our company slogan, Change The World, is also about what each of us can do and as the first step, I want to replicate our way of doing things across the entire industry. We can use AI and purpose-built tools to let people focus on what they love.
Automate everything that's boring and repetitive. Let your team be creative and have fun doing their jobs. That's the true power of AI. It's a force multiplier, freeing people to be happy doing purpose-driven work.
In two years, we've become the only company that's creating a unified platform for browser gaming. Google, Apple, Amazon, they've left this space unoccupied. We're now the fastest-growing company in this niche. That's the reason, combined with our business model and technology, why we can become No 1 in the world… and much more.
Right now, we're looking for people who understand this opportunity. CTW is, of course, looking for top-level developers. But more than anything we want people who have the ambition to build something great.?
We give more freedom than any company I've worked at — by far — for ideas to become not just tools but an entire branch of the business.
If you think you can build it, we'll get you there. There’s no other place offering that kind of freedom and opportunity to developers and engineers today.
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For more information about our available positions, have a look below.?
We’re actively looking for talent in the following roles.