Don’t Ever Bet Against The Fire Ape

I feel like Galileo saying the Earth revolves around the sun. I feel like Darwin claiming evolution is a thing. I feel like Semmelweis pronouncing that not washing your hands spreads germs (look it up).

In short, I feel like I am 100% correct but that I’m about to be laughed at, mocked, and hated for sharing my views.

And that view is this: I think artificial intelligence is simply awesome. Yep, I love AI. I think AI is great. I say that as a human, I say that as a journalist, I say that as someone who has watched most of the The Terminator franchise. 

Are there dangers associated with it? I reckon so. We’ll figure it out. Or we won’t. Either way, progress. Westward ho and all. 

Humanity is built to push boundaries. If we didn’t, where would we be? Imagine if the first ape-man who discovered fire was immediately told to put it out. 

FIRE APE: Look at this! Fire! Heat! We can stay warm!

OTHER APES: Nah, it’s going to put all the pelt-makers out of business. Let’s skip it.

That’s not humanity. That would’ve been stupidity. Humans come up with ideas, we put those ideas into motion, and we move up to the next level. AI is no different. Many people are scared or dismissive of it — especially 99% of journalists I’ve talked to about it — but that’s head-in-the-sand behavior. It’s like being a toddler and thinking if you shut your eyes, the rest of the world disappears.

AI is here. The end. 

Don’t believe me? Find me another invention in all of human history that makes life easier, that makes life more efficient, but we say, “Nah, we good.” It simply doesn’t exist. Every major technological leap comes with naysayers, but they’re eventually proven wrong. 

Hello Nigel

Which is why I’m going to be watching the people who are thinking like me in the gambling space very closely. Like Nigel Eccles.

Eccles, of course, co-founded FanDuel. So yeah, when he places a bet on where the gambling industry is going, it’s worth paying attention. His latest is BetHog, a crypto online casino and sportsbook he launched in 2024 with fellow FanDuel co-founder Rob Jones. And BetHog just announced a $10 million Series A round, most of which is going toward Sentient Studios, a new outfit BetHog is spinning up to provide AI-powered live dealers to other operators.

The headline product is Sunny. Sunny is an AI blackjack dealer. She is, per Eccles, 10 times more popular than the live human dealer equivalent BetHog ran before her. Better retention. Better player satisfaction. Speaks 12 languages. Doesn’t take breaks. Doesn’t look bored. Doesn’t, as Eccles put it on the Business of Betting podcast, look like she’s “not living her best life.”

That last bit is where Eccles got me. Because his pitch for why AI dealers beat human dealers isn’t actually about cost, though they cost less, and it isn’t about scale, though they scale. It’s about the current live dealer product being bad.

“My own personal experience is 90% of the time it’s not good,” Eccles said. “Five to 10% of the time, it’s great, it really does deliver. The person’s personable, they enjoy their job. But what if we could make it consistently good?”

And it’s not just that Sunny shows up to work every day, happy to be there. She’s been built to act like a human in the ways humans are good at acting like humans. She has hundreds of what Eccles calls “idle moves,” little gestures that don’t do anything but make her feel less robotic. She’ll talk strategy with you. (“The book says you should hit, but it’s your call.”) She reads the room. If you’re losing, she dials it down. If you’re winning, she gets chattier. 

When I asked Eccles how far we are from being able to actually talk to her — voice, not text — he basically said: Tomorrow, if we want.

“Voicing is a solved problem,” he told me. “We actually deliberately decided not to do it. But we can do that in the next couple of weeks if we wanted, and I actually think we might go there.”

Which got me thinking about something I hadn’t seen pitched before: At some point, presumably soon, you should be able to build your own dealer. Not pick one off a menu, but quickly design one. Want a dealer who looks like your high school English teacher? That sounds like Morgan Freeman? That compliments your derring-do when you split tens? Why not? The tech is there. 

Which brings me to Maria.

Maria is BetHog’s other dealer. She’s currently on the shelf. Where Sunny is warm and welcoming and optimistic and, well, sunny, Maria is “Colombian and she’s very feisty and she will happily roast you. If you have a bad loss, she’ll think it’s hilarious.”

Eccles loved Maria. So did I, when he described her. She sounds amazing.

You know who didn’t love Maria? About 80% to 90% of BetHog’s testers, who, per Eccles, “thought she was awful.”

But that 10-20% who liked her? “Loved her. They thought she was hilarious.”

Which is, when you think about it, exactly the case for letting players build their own. The reason live-dealer casinos feel mediocre 90% of the time isn’t because the dealers are bad. It’s because one bored human dealing to a hundred different players is boring. AI breaks that. You’re no longer matching one product to a mass audience. You’re matching the product to the player.

Anyway, that’s the future. For now, Sunny deals blackjack. Roulette and baccarat are coming later in 2026. Sentient Studios is being shopped to other operators on a rev-share model with no startup fees, which is the kind of pricing you offer when you’re confident the product sells itself.

Betting on the future

So here’s where we are.

Eccles is doing the thing that is going to happen regardless: He’s not asking whether AI belongs in gambling, he’s just building it. And his early data — namely that it is 10x more popular than live dealer, thus building retention and satisfaction — suggests the players have already voted. They like it. They like it a lot. Faster than Eccles himself expected.

And let’s remember we’re, what, 18 months into the modern AI era? Everyone says we’re in the first inning. I’m not too sure about that. It’s almost like the grounds crew is finishing up raking the infield and Enrico Pallazzo is warming up his pipes for the National Anthem. 

So go ahead and laugh at us AI bulls. Go ahead and tell us we’re being naive, or reckless, or insufficiently worried about the robot apocalypse. That’s fine. We’re used to it. Galileo got house arrest. Semmelweis got committed to an asylum, where he died (look that one up too).

I just don’t recommend betting against us. The fire ape won. The fire ape always wins.