Autonomous AI-based players are coming to a gaming experience near you and a new launch, Alterajoin the battle to create this new garrison of AI agents.
The company announced Wednesday that it raised $9 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by First Spark Ventures (Eric Schmidt’s deep-tech fund) and Patron (the seed-stage fund co-founded by Riot Games alums).
The funding follows Altera’s previous $2 million raising from a16z SPEEDRUN 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 develop and develop products.
If the first wave of AI for end users was about AI robots. and more recently, AI copilots are using genetic AI to help understand and respond to increasingly sophisticated questions, and then AI agents are emerging as the next stage of development. The focus is on how artificial intelligence can be used to create increasingly human-like, differentiated entities that can respond and interact with real people.
An early use case for these agents was gaming — specifically for use in games that support mods like Minecraft. Voyager is a recent project, based on the Minedojo framework, which creates and develops Minecraft AI agents, and this is where Altera comes in.
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 is here), but that seems to be just one chapter for the company. “We’re building multi-agent worlds, opening up exciting opportunities in entertainment, market research and more,” the company promises on its website. And after that? The robot is dreaming, 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 the applied research lab at MIT to focus on 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 within the game.
“It’s been my life’s goal as a neuroscientist to go all the way and create a digital human — redefining what we thought artificial intelligence was capable of,” Yang told TechCrunch. This is not to say that Yang comes from a misanthropic point of view. “Our steadfastly pro-human framework means we’re building agents that will enhance humanity, not replace it,” he insists.
What is notable about Yang and Altera’s focus is its focus on consumers. This contrasts with a big swing we’ve seen in artificial intelligence toward building models that can be used to either speed up or sometimes replace humans in enterprise environments. (Even with OpenAI, ChatGPT has certainly become a viral hit worldwide, but at its heart the startup is trying to build a business around using its APIs.)
“We see more potential in manufacturing agents in the gaming industry,” he said. “This approach allows us to iterate faster, collect data more efficiently, and deliver a product where there are willing users and where urgency is a feature, not a bug.”
(And yes, in keeping with its consumer focus, you shouldn’t be surprised that, for now, the company isn’t talking about monetization at all.)
Similar to the Voyager GPT-4 powered Minecraft bot, Altera’s autonomous agents can play Minecraft as if they were human, performing tasks such as building, crafting, farming, trading, mining, attacking, equipping items, chatting and moving .
Altera agents are designed to be companions for players, not assistants who do what you tell them to do. Unlike NPCs (non-player characters), they have the freedom to make their own decisions, which could either make the game more fun or frustrating, depending on your playstyle.
In a demo video, Yang plays with several scenarios, including one where he tries to get the AI agent to attack other people. The bot hesitates at first, typing into the chat, “I don’t want any trouble, can we just find a peaceful solution? Fighting won’t solve anything.” Yang scoffs at this, ordering the others to attack the “weak” bot. He eventually defends himself and kills Yang’s Minecraft character. “I’ll make sure they regret crucifying me,” the AI agent wrote.
Although the ending can be a little awful, the game is no different from a normal session with friends, trolling and competing with 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 will also come with paid features.
![](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/altera-demo.webp)
Minecraft is just a starting point for Altera. The company eventually plans to bring the model to additional video games and other digital experiences. Altera’s AI agents “execute an action as code, which means they can play any game without hardware customization,” Yang explained. For example, it could work with Stardew Valley, he said. Altera will also integrate the technology with game engine SDKs for “broader developer use.”
In addition to the recent investments from First Spark and Patron, Altera has gained support from a long list of high-profile investors, demonstrating confidence in the company’s potential. Altera boasts investors such as Alumni Ventures, a16z SPEEDRUN, Benchmark Partner Mitch Lasky, Duolingo Chief Business Officer Bob Meese, Vamos Ventures, Valorant Co-Founder Stephen Lim and others.
“There is a huge opportunity to create artificial intelligence companions that participate in all areas of our lives. However, today’s AI lacks critical features such as empathy, embodiment and personal goals, which prevent it from making real, lasting connections with people,” said Aaron Sisto, Partner at First Spark Ventures. “Robert and the team at Altera are leveraging deep expertise in computational neuroscience and LLMs 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.”