Autonomous AI players come to play near you and your recent startup, Alterajoins the fight to build a recent guard of AI agents.
The company announced Wednesday that it had raised $9 million in an oversubscribed seed round co-led by First Spark Ventures (Eric Schmidt’s high-tech fund) and Patron (a seed-stage fund co-founded by Riot Games alumni).
The funding follows Altera’s previous $2 million pre-seed raise from a16z SPEEDRUN and others in January this 12 months. Now Altera wants to make use of the recent capital to rent more scientists, engineers and team members to assist with product development and growth.
If the first wave of end-user AI were AI bots; and more recently, AI “co-pilots” are using generative AI to assist understand and reply to increasingly sophisticated queries, with AI agents becoming the next stage of development. The focus is on how artificial intelligence may be used to create increasingly human-like, differentiated entities that may reply to and interact with real people.
One of the early use cases for these agents was gaming – particularly in games that support modifications (mods) reminiscent of Minecraft. Voyager is one of the last projects built on the Minedojo framework, which creates and develops Minecraft AI agents, and this is also where Altera starts.
The company’s first product is an AI agent that may play Minecraft with you “like a friend” (the waiting list to try it out is here), but it appears that evidently this is only the first chapter in the company’s history. “We build multi-agent worlds, opening up exciting opportunities for entertainment, market research and more,” the company guarantees on its website. And then? The robot appears to be dreaming.
“Creating the human characteristics necessary to transform co-pilots into collaborators and exploring a world where digital humans are given physical form,” explains Altera.
Altera is headed by Robert Yang, a neuroscientist and former assistant professor at MIT. In December 2023, Yang and Altera’s remaining co-founders — Andrew Ahn, Nico Christie and Shuying Luo — left their applied research lab at MIT to focus on a recent goal: developing artificial intelligence agents (or “AI buddies,” as Yang calls them ) with “social-emotional intelligence” that may interact with players and make its own in-game decisions.
“My life goal as a neuroscientist was to go all the way and build the digital human – redefining what we thought artificial intelligence was capable of,” Yang told TechCrunch. This does not mean that Yang represents a misanthropic viewpoint. “Our strongly pro-human framework means that we build agents that will enhance humanity, not replace it,” he insists.
What’s notable about Yang and Alter’s approach is its focus on consumers. This contrasts with the big shift we have seen in artificial intelligence towards creating models that may be used to hurry up or sometimes replace humans in enterprise environments. (Even with OpenAI, ChatGPT definitely became a viral hit around the world, but the startup was actually attempting to build a business around leveraging its APIs.)
“We see more potential in building agents in the gaming industry,” he said. “This approach allows us to iterate faster, collect data more efficiently, and deliver a product that engages users and where emerging behaviors are a feature, not a bug.”
(And yes, true to its consumer-centric focus, you mustn’t be surprised that the company is not talking about monetization at all for now.)
Like the Voyager GPT-4-based Minecraft bot, Altera’s autonomous agents can play Minecraft as if they were humans, performing tasks reminiscent of building, crafting, farming, trading, mining, attacking, equipping items, talking, and moving around.
Altera agents are meant to be players’ companions, not assistants who do what you tell them to do. Unlike NPCs (non-player characters), they have the freedom to make their very own decisions, which might make the game more interesting or frustrating, depending on your playstyle.
In the video demonstration, Yang plays with multiple scenarios, including one in which he tries to persuade an AI agent to attack other people. The bot hesitates at first and types in the chat: “I don’t desire any trouble, can we just find a peaceful solution? Fighting won’t solve anything.” Yang taunts him, ordering the others to attack the “weak” bot. Eventually, the Minecraft character Yang defends himself and kills him. “I’ll make sure they regret messing with me,” the AI agent wrote.
While the ending could also be a bit ominous, the gameplay is no different from a regular session with friends, trolling and competing with each other.
Altera is currently testing the model with 750 Minecraft players and plans to officially launch later this summer. It will probably be available through the Altera desktop app, which is free to download but may even include paid features.
Minecraft is just the start line for Altera. The company plans to eventually roll out the model to additional video games and other digital experiences. Altera’s AI agents “execute the action as code, which means they can play any game without having to adjust the materials,” Yang explained. He said this might work for Stardew Valley, for example. Altera may even integrate the technology into its game engine SDKs for “broader use by developers.”
In addition to recent investments from First Spark and Patron, Altera has been backed by a long list of reputable investors, demonstrating confidence in the company’s potential. Altera boasts investors reminiscent of Alumni Ventures, a16z SPEEDRUN, Benchmark partner Mitch Lasky, Duolingo chief business officer Bob Meese, Vamos Ventures, Valorant co-founder Stephen Lim and more.
“There is a huge opportunity to create AI companions that engage in all areas of our lives. However, today’s AI lacks key characteristics such as empathy, embodiment and personal goals, which prevents it from forming true, lasting connections with people,” Aaron Sisto, partner at First Spark Ventures, said in a statement. “Robert and the Altera team leverage deep expertise in computational neuroscience and LLM to create radically new types of AI agents that are fun, unique, and persistent across platforms. We are excited to be a part of their journey.”