These AI Minecraft characters did weirdly human stuff all on their own

The work, from AI startup Altera, is part of a broader field that wants to use simulated agents to model how human groups would react to new economic policies or other interventions. But for Altera's founder, Robert Yang, who quit his position as an assistant professor in computational neuroscience at MIT to start the company, this demo is just the beginning. He sees it as an early step towards large-scale "AI civilizations" that can coexist and work alongside us in digital spaces. "The true power of AI will be unlocked when we have actually truly autonomous agents that can collaborate at scale," says Yang. Yang was inspired by Stanford University researcher Joon Sung Park who, in 2023, found that surprisingly humanlike behaviors arose when a group of 25 autonomous AI agents was let loose to interact in a basic digital world. "Once his paper was out, we started to work on it the next week," says Yang. "I quit MIT six months after that."