What happens if you release 1000 AIs into the virtual world

“Digital Humans” startup Altera has created the first large-scale artificial civilization by releasing 1,000 simultaneous AI agents in the Minecraft environment, according to a lengthy report MIT Technology Review.

Although the project began in September, the passage of time has allowed us to see impressive results: they created specialized jobs, voted for their own tax reforms, and even created a religion.

Why is this important. This experiment marks an important milestone in our ability to understand how AIs can interact in groups and develop complex social behavior. And this could be the first step towards the creation of artificial civilizations that coexist with people in the digital environment.

Context. Robert Young, a former MIT professor, founded Altera after being inspired by a Stanford experiment that demonstrated remarkably human-like behavior in a group of 25 AI agents.

Ian decided to take the idea to the extreme: what would happen to 1000?

Details. AI agents equipped with modular brains based on language models have demonstrated amazing capabilities…

• Develop unique personalities: some become extroverts, others become introverts.
• Create roles: builders, traders, explorers appeared…
• Establish social relationships. They became friends and maintained “rating” systems for each other.
• Get involved in politics. They voted for tax reforms and exerted mutual influence.

Between the lines. AI agents not only survived, but thrived. The artificial cook, for example, gave more food to those who valued it more. Artists spent more time collecting flowers. They all developed behaviors consistent with their chosen roles.

Now Altera plans to expand into Roblox and other virtual worlds with its usual premise: creating “digital humans” by taking advantage of these already functional environments. The long-term plan is for them to interact with us humans in everyday life, helping us solve problems and entertaining us.

Go deeper. The experiment demonstrates that properly trained and adapted large language models are able to capture human social dynamics and convincingly reproduce them, creating a realistic collective environment.

It now remains to be seen what implications this may have for our digital future.

In Hatak | This player has been exploring Minecraft for 11 years and still hasn’t reached his destination

Featured Image | Xataka with Midjourney