You're the founder of a scrappy AI lab: perpetually compute-starved, wildly over-hyped, one demo away from either a mega-round or a very public catastrophe.
Train models
Pick a model type, a dataset of questionable provenance, and how much you care about alignment. Watch it grow from glorious nonsense into something that almost works. Ship it and read the reviews.
Split the compute
One pool of compute, two hungry mouths: training the next model versus serving the one that pays the bills. You can't max both. That tension is the whole game.
Climb, raise, exit
Beat rival labs up the leaderboard, raise rounds at increasingly absurd valuations, then exit — IPO, acquisition, or something stranger — and start again with what you learned.
Questions people actually ask
Is Lab Tycoon free?
Yes. The game is free, every era is free, and the whole arc is playable without paying. There are a few optional in-app purchases for people who want to tip the lab.
What kind of game is it?
An idle tycoon sim in the Game Dev Tycoon lineage, pointed at the AI gold rush. You make real decisions between sessions of watching numbers go up, and the numbers are very committed to going up.
Does it play itself while I'm gone?
Your models keep serving users and earning while the app is closed. Come back, collect, and decide whether the next dollar goes to training or inference. That split is the whole game.
What phones does it run on?
iPhone, iOS 17 or later. No Android version yet; if that changes, this page will say so.
How long is a run?
A first exit lands in a few hours of real time. Then you found the next startup with legacy perks and do it faster, which is where the game actually starts.