The ping-pong lemma was introduced by Klein in the late 1800s to show that certain subgroups of isometries of hyperbolic 3-space are free and remains one of very few tools that certify when a pair of group elements generate a free subgroup or semigroup. Quantitatively applying the ping-pong lemma to more general group actions on metric spaces requires a blend of understanding the large-scale global geometry of the underlying space with local combinatorial and dynamical behavior of the action. In the 1980s, Gromov publish a sequence of seminal works introducing several metric notions of non-positive curvature in group theory where he asked which finitely generated groups have uniform exponential growth. We give an overview of various developments of non-positive curvature in group theory and past results related to building free semigroups in the setting of non-positive curvature. We highlight joint work with Radhika Gupta and Kasia Jankiewicz and with Carolyn Abbott and Davide Spriano that extends these tools and techniques to show several groups with that act on cube complexes and many hierarchically hyperbolic groups have uniform exponential growth. / Mathematics