1,000 Autonomous AI Agents Collaborating? Altera Simulates It In Minecraft (readwrite.com) 21
Altera AI's home page says their mission is "to create digital human beings that live, care, and grow with us," adding that their company builds machines "with fundamental human qualities, starting with friends that can play video games with you."
And while their agents can function in many different games and apps, Altera used Minecraft to launch "the first-ever simulation of over 1,000 collaborating autonomous AI agents," reports ReadWrite, "working together in a Minecraft world, all of which can operate for hours or days without intervention from humans." The agents have already started to develop their own economy, culture, religion, and government, with the AI already working on establishing its own systems. The CEO Robert Yang took to X to share the news and introduce Project Sid...
So far, the agents have already formed a merchant hub, have voted in a democracy, spread religions, and collected five times more distinct items than before... "Though starting in games, we're solving the deepest issues facing agents: coherence, multi-agent collaboration, and long-term progression," said the CEO.
According to the video, the most active trader in their simulation was the priest — because he was bribing the other townsfolk to convert to his religion. (Which apparently involved the Flying Spaghetti Monster...) "We run these worlds every day, and they're always different," the video's narrator says, while pointing out that their agents had collected 32% of all the items in Minecraft — five times more than anything ever reported for an individual agent.
"Sid starts in Minecraft, but we are already going beyond," CEO Yang says in the video, calling it "the first-ever agent civilization."
And while their agents can function in many different games and apps, Altera used Minecraft to launch "the first-ever simulation of over 1,000 collaborating autonomous AI agents," reports ReadWrite, "working together in a Minecraft world, all of which can operate for hours or days without intervention from humans." The agents have already started to develop their own economy, culture, religion, and government, with the AI already working on establishing its own systems. The CEO Robert Yang took to X to share the news and introduce Project Sid...
So far, the agents have already formed a merchant hub, have voted in a democracy, spread religions, and collected five times more distinct items than before... "Though starting in games, we're solving the deepest issues facing agents: coherence, multi-agent collaboration, and long-term progression," said the CEO.
According to the video, the most active trader in their simulation was the priest — because he was bribing the other townsfolk to convert to his religion. (Which apparently involved the Flying Spaghetti Monster...) "We run these worlds every day, and they're always different," the video's narrator says, while pointing out that their agents had collected 32% of all the items in Minecraft — five times more than anything ever reported for an individual agent.
"Sid starts in Minecraft, but we are already going beyond," CEO Yang says in the video, calling it "the first-ever agent civilization."
That doesn't sound like Minecraft (Score:1)
That sounds like a lot of random stuff expressed via Minecraft. After all, there is no game mechanic for founding a religion, and no benefit to a player from belonging to one.
I doubt there is any cause-and-effect chain in play here with any meaning to it.
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near-zero reaction time is fair enough, isn't it? that's one of the real benefits of "AI" and it can help in real-world tasks also. similar to how chatgpt is pants-on-head retarded but nonetheless had enough "patience" and time to read a kajillion articles about everything so it can fake a conversation way better. also it doesn't have to remember to breathe; otherwise it would be dead.
tbh i don't see the "perfect knowledge of game state" much anymore, and the point of recent AI research is to avoid it.
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Like the simple checkboxes of existence (Score:2)
Company promising yet another product by promising it has yes/no checkboxes checked for different areas of human society. No need to have any depth or complexity for each area, just need to tic the box yes/no.
I for one welcome our new (Score:2)
collaborating bribing simulated robot overlords.
Sounds like a setup for Futurama (Score:2)
The agents have already started to develop their own economy, culture, religion, and government,
In Godfellas [wikipedia.org], where Bender is accidentally shot into space, starts a conversation with an unknown being, then has a civilization sprout on him after being struck by a asteroid, the two groups of Shrimpkins eventually go to war with one another due differences in their beliefs. How long until these agents do the same thing? Only then will we truly know AI has reached the level of humanity.
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I think it's interesting to try this stuff, but there is not going to be a practical outcome. Either they (in minecraft) will kill each other if there is no permadeath in the game, and if there is no permadeath in the game the game will leverage death as a mechanic.
Like if there is something we learned from the Plague in WoW, and later with Covid IRL, is that people will willingly spread pathogens. An AI will not learn this behavior because it doesn't know anything about the nature of disease.
Re:Sounds like a setup for Futurama (Score:4, Interesting)
An AI will not learn this behavior because it doesn't know anything about the nature of disease.
But it could learn. If it notices that people with a certain characteristic who come in contact with others who then get sick or die, it might be able to make the leap of association. How it would response would be even more telling than developing a religion or government. Would it deliberately try to kill off these people? Would it try to quarantine them? Would it try to devise a way to counteract them? Or would it do nothing and let things play out?
I'm not saying AI can reason, but it's not out of the realm that either with the proper coding or through how it's currently programmed, it might be able to see what is going on and react.
"economy, culture, religion, and government" (Score:2)
The agents have already started to develop their own economy, culture, religion, and government
Man I wish Slashdot allowed images right now. All I want to do is post a Princess Bride "I do not think that those words mean what you think they mean" animated gif.
Uh what? (Score:2)
This sounds like even more bullshit than Devin. Let's invest, and FAST!
So like Dwarf Fortress? (Score:2)
This basically sounds like they recreated what games like Dwarf Fortress have been able to do for decades.
Simulating hundreds if not thousands of agents creating societies, running economies, waging wars, etc is kind of standard to the simulator genre. The only real limiting factor is whether your CPU can handle it without burning out.
More animist bullshit (Score:3)
No, these systems do not have "human qualities". The assholes claiming that just want to sell you something.
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I think the useful takeaway here is that a lot of the things we do are more basic than we think they are. We're extremely self-impressed because of all the things we've accomplished, but some of them can also be done by slime molds or ants so we should maybe reconsider how great it is that we can do them too.
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Yep. We are currently finding out that many things human do are not special or exclusive or anything. But this time it is in the mental space. That said, some humans (not that many) can do things that are special. These are essentially the independent thinkers (at 10-15%) and those that can fact-check and can be convinced by rational arguments (about 20% for the latter). That the rest does not understand that and keeps messing up and not seeing reality does not change that.
But the fact of the matter is that
They not emulating (Score:2)
So it doesn't reflect an economy that often rewards greed, selfishness and dishonesty.
I'm guessing, inside this pretend world, there are no plagues, no crippling addictions, no unwanted pregnancies, no mental-health problems, no overpopulation, no selfishness like holidays, tiredness and casual sex, and no people with un-valued skill-sets and unworthy life-choices.
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Minecraft only implements three of those, mostly overpopulation. The world is not infinite so you can run out of space in a popular enough world with large enough creations. And the last two things, too. People can just think you suck.
NEW Machine Spirit Prayers (Score:1)
Already done in the 90's - Creatures (Score:2)
It was a video game called Creatures:
- wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
- fandom [fandom.com]
The agents in the game achieved cooperation, companionship, and emergent behaviours including mourning.