Autonomous, AI-powered players are coming 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 announced on Wednesday that it had raised $9 million in an oversubscribed seed round co-led by First Spark Ventures (Eric Schmidt’s deep tech fund) and Patron (the seed-stage fund co-founded by Riot Games alumni). collected US dollars.
The funding follows Altera’s previous raising of $2 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others in January of this year. Now Altera wants to use the new capital to hire more scientists, engineers and team members to help with product development and growth.
If the first wave of end-user AI was about AI bots; and more recently, AI “copilots” are using generative AI to understand and respond to increasingly sophisticated requests, then AI agents are emerging as the next stage of development. The focus is on how AI can be used to create increasingly human-like, sophisticated entities that can respond to and interact with real people.
An early use case for these agents was gaming – particularly for use in games that support modifications (mods) such as Minecraft. Voyager is a current project building on the Minedojo framework that creates and develops Minecraft AI agents, and this is also where Altera gets its start.
The company’s first product is an AI agent that can play Minecraft with you “just like a friend” (the waiting list to try it out can be found here), but this appears to be just chapter one for the company. “We are building multi-agent worlds, opening up exciting opportunities in entertainment, market research and more,” the company promises on its website. And then? Robot dreams, it seems.
“Creating the human qualities needed to turn co-pilots into colleagues and exploring a world where digital humans are given a physical form factor,” explains Altera.
At the helm of Altera is Robert Yang, a neuroscientist and former assistant professor at MIT. In December 2023, Yang and Altera’s other co-founders – Andrew Ahn, Nico Christie and Shuying Luo – left their applied research lab at MIT to pursue a new goal: developing AI agents (or “AI friends”) , as Yang calls them) with “social-emotional intelligence” that can interact with players and make their own decisions in the game.
“My goal in life as a neuroscientist was to go all the way and build a digital human — redefining what AI was capable of,” Yang told TechCrunch. This does not mean that Yang acts from a misanthropic point of view. “Our robust, pro-human framework means we develop agents that empower, not replace, humanity,” he emphasizes.
What’s notable about Yang and Altera’s focus is their focus on the consumer. This contrasts with a major shift we have seen in AI towards developing models that can be used to either accelerate or sometimes replace humans in enterprise environments. (Even with OpenAI, ChatGPT was certainly a viral hit worldwide, but essentially the startup was trying to build a business around using its APIs.)
“We see more potential in building agents within the gaming industry,” he said. “This approach allows us to iterate faster, collect data more effectively, and deliver a product where there are eager users and where emerging behavior is a feature, not a bug.”
(And yes, in keeping with its consumer focus, it shouldn’t surprise you that the company isn’t talking about monetization at all for now.)
Similar to the Voyager GPT-4 based Minecraft bot, Altera’s autonomous agents are capable of playing Minecraft as if they were humans and completing tasks such as building, crafting, farming, trading, mining, attacking, equipping items, Chat and move.
Altera’s Agents are designed to be companions for players, not assistants who do what you tell them. Unlike NPCs (non-player characters), they have the freedom to make their own decisions, which can make the game either more entertaining or frustrating depending on your play style.
In a video demo, Yang plays through several scenarios, including one in which he tries to convince the AI agent to attack other people. The bot hesitates at first and types into the chat: “I don’t want any trouble, can we just find a peaceful solution?” Fighting won’t solve anything.” Yang mocks him and orders others to attack the “weak” bot. It eventually defends itself and kills Yang’s Minecraft character. “I will make them regret bothering me,” the AI agent wrote.
While the ending may be a bit scary, the gameplay is no different than a normal session with friends, frolicking and competing against each other.
Altera is currently testing the model with 750 Minecraft players and plans to officially launch it later this summer. It will be available through Altera’s desktop app, which is free to download but also offers paid features.
Minecraft is just a starting point for Altera. The company plans to eventually apply the model to other video games and other digital experiences. Altera’s AI agents “perform an action as code, meaning they can play any game without material customization,” Yang explained. For example, it could work with Stardew Valley, he said. Altera will also integrate the technology into game engine SDKs to enable “broader use by developers.”
In addition to recent investments from First Spark and Patron, Altera has received the support of a long list of high-profile investors, demonstrating confidence in the company’s potential. Altera has investors including 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 critical qualities like empathy, embodiment and personal goals, which prevent it from forming real, lasting connections with people,” Aaron Sisto, partner at First Spark Ventures, said in a statement. “Robert and the team at Altera leverage deep expertise in computational neuroscience and LLMs to develop entirely new types of AI agents that are fun, unique, and consistent across platforms. We are excited to be part of their journey.”