Autonomous AI-based players come to a gaming experience near you. And a new startup, Altera, is joining the fight to build this new guard of AI agents.
The company said Wednesday it has raised $9 million in an oversubscribed seed round co-led by First Spark Ventures (Eric Schmidt's deep tech fund) and Patron (a seed stage fund co-founded by Riot Games alumni). Announced.
This funding follows Altera's pre-seed $2 million raise from Andreessen Horowitz and others in January. Altera now hopes to use the new capital to hire more scientists, engineers and team members to help develop and grow its products.
Let's say the first wave of end-user AI was about AI bots. And more recently, AI agents are the next step in development, with AI “co-pilots” using generative AI to understand and respond to increasingly sophisticated queries. The focus is on how AI can be used to create more subtle, human-like entities that can react and interact with real humans.
One of the early use cases for these agents was in games, especially in games that support modification (MOD), like Minecraft. Voyager is one of the recent projects built on the Minedojo framework to create and develop Minecraft AI agents. This is also the starting point for Altera.
The company's first product is an AI agent that lets you play Minecraft together “like friends” (here's a waiting list to try it), but it looks like this is just the first chapter for the company. is. “We are building a multi-agent world and opening up exciting opportunities in entertainment, market research, and more,” the company promises on its site. And after that? The robot seems to be dreaming.
“It’s about creating the human qualities needed to turn co-pilots into co-workers and exploring a world where digital humans are given a physical form factor,” Altera explains.
(1/5) Altera agents can now craft diamond tools from scratch in Minecraft. Compared to the famous Voyager method, our agents are 10-20 times cheaper and more reliable, while being completely autonomous and independent of Minecraft. And you can play with them right now. Join the waiting list! pic.twitter.com/lQB6Kq3vKR
— Robert Yang (@GuangyuRobert) March 15, 2024
Altera is led by neuroscientist Robert Yang, a former assistant professor at MIT. In December 2023, Yang and Altera's other co-founders, Andrew An, Nico Christie, and Luo Shuying, left MIT's Applied Research Lab to develop an AI agent (in Yang's case, We focused on a new goal: developing AI buddies (also known as AI buddies). We call them players who have “social-emotional intelligence” that allows them to interact with players and make their own decisions in-game.
“My life goal as a neuroscientist is to do everything in my power to build digital humans and redefine what we thought AI was capable of,” Yang told TechCrunch. It's not that Yang is coming from a misanthropic perspective. “Our firmly pro-humanity framework means we are building agents that enhance rather than replace humanity,” he argues.
What's remarkable about Yang and Altera is their focus on the consumer. This is in contrast to the big move we've seen in AI towards building models that can be used faster in enterprise environments, or in some cases to replace humans. (Even with OpenAI, ChatGPT was certainly a huge hit globally, but essentially the startup was trying to build a business around using the API.)
“We see further potential in building agents within the gaming industry,” he said. “This approach allows us to iterate faster, collect data more effectively, and deliver products where we have engaged users and where emergent behaviors are features rather than bugs.”
(And given its focus on consumers, don't be surprised that the company isn't talking about monetization at all at this point.)
Similar to Voyager GPT-4-powered Minecraft bots, Altera's autonomous agents play Minecraft as if they were humans, building, crafting, farming, trading, mining, attacking, equipping items, chatting, and moving. You can perform tasks such as:
Altera's agents are designed to be gamers' companions, not assistants that follow your commands. Unlike NPCs (non-player characters), they have the freedom to make their own decisions, which can make the game more interesting or frustrating depending on your play style.
In the video demo, Yang tries out several scenarios, including one in which he tries to convince an AI agent to attack someone. The bot hesitated at first and entered the following into the chat: “We don't want trouble. Can we find a peaceful solution?” Fighting won't solve anything. ” Yang scoffs at it and orders the others to attack the “weak” bots. Eventually defends himself and kills Jan's Minecraft character. “I will make them regret ever crossing me,” the AI agent wrote.
Although the ending may be a bit ominous, the gameplay is no different from a regular session of trolling with friends or competing against each other.
Altera is currently testing this model with 750 Minecraft players and plans to officially release it in late summer. It is available via Altera's desktop app, which is free to download but also comes with paid features.
Minecraft is just the starting point for Altera. The company eventually plans to bring this model to other video games and other digital experiences as well. His AI agent in Altera “executes actions as code, which means you can play any game without customizing materials,” Yang explained. For example, he said, it could work with Stardew Valley. Altera also plans to integrate the technology with game engine SDKs for “broader developer use.”
In addition to recent investments by First Spark and Patron, Altera has received support from a long list of prominent investors, demonstrating confidence in the company's potential. Altera's investors include Alumni Ventures, a16z SPEEDRUN, Benchmark's partner Mitch Lasky, Duolingo chief business officer Bob Meese, Vamos Ventures, and Valorant co-founder Stephen Lim. Masu.
“A huge opportunity exists to create AI companions that touch every area of our lives. However, today's AI lacks important characteristics such as empathy, embodiment, and personal goals, making it difficult to interact with people. They are unable to build real, lasting connections,” Aaron Sisto, partner at First Spark Ventures, said in a statement. “Robert and the Alterra team are leveraging deep expertise in computational neuroscience and LLM to build fundamentally new types of AI agents that are fun, unique, and persistent across platforms. I'm excited to be a part of the journey.”