Artificial Intelligence (Score 1)

One of the lines the marketers are feeding us on the GeForce 3d card by NVIDIA is that their T&L will free up the CPU for other tasks such as artificial intelligence, and Sega's Dreamcast ads repeat the line 'It's thinking'. Although some games styles like fighters, side scrollers and sports games have had sufficient AI for many years, some of the newer game styles like FPSs and RTSs demand a higher quality of AI and gameplay can suffer without it. What direction do you think games will be taking in the near future [2 years] with regards to AI? Do you think that the explosion in popularity of on-line multi-player style play will reduce the demand in the short term for decent AI? Do you see the more complex types of games which need the advanced AI playing a major role in the future game market, or will we all be playing Deer Hunter and NHL 2002? :)