An alleged Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning developer who claims to have worked on technology for Valve Corporation’s rumored Half-Life 3 says that the game’s announcement is imminent.
In a post in the Valve and Half-Life sub-reddits, user Source2LeakAIML claimed that while they aren’t a Valve employee, they work at a major Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) lab that has partnered with the company on breakthrough physics technology for the game. While unverified, the post has drawn attention due to its additional claim that an official Half-Life 3 announcement is set to happen on December 11, 2025.
According to the alleged AI/ML developer, who states they will soon delete their account, Valve’s barrier to developing Half-Life 3 was not narrative or design, but computational cost. “The breakthrough Valve was waiting for was the ability to handle physics-specifically fluids and destruction-using machine learning instead of expensive deterministic calculations,” they said.
Source2LeakAIML claims Valve has integrated a new pipeline into Source 2 that relies on brute-forced, high-fidelity simulations only during the training phase. These simulations are used to generate “ground-truth datasets” that power machine-learning models capable of predicting complex physics interactions in real time. In their words, this approach enables “movie-quality water simulations, 1:1 structural destruction, and complex vehicle physics, all running smoothly on a mid-tier GPU.”
The assertion is that hardware would essentially offload the heaviest physics calculations to pre-trained ML models, dramatically reducing runtime cost. According to the alleged developer, this tech could allow developers to produce experiences with “100x the physical interactivity at less than 1% of the historical compute cost.” They describe Half-Life 3 as the flagship demonstration of this advancement.
In a follow-up comment, Source2LeakAIML mentioned one additional detail. They said, “Final info is December 11th is the date HL3 gets announced. I may log back in on the 12th to answer more questions about the physics piece. Prepare to be blown away!”
