Bye-bye bots: Altera’s game-playing AI agents get backing from Eric Schmidt

techcrunch.com:

Autonomous, AI-based players are coming to a gaming experience near you, and a new startup, Altera, is joining the fray to build this new guard of AI agents.

The company announced Wednesday that it 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 alums).

The funding follows Altera’s previous raising a pre-seed $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 AI for end users was about AI bots; and more recently, AI “copilots” use generative AI to help understand and respond to increasingly sophisticated queries, then AI agents are emerging as the next stage of development. The focus is on how AI can be used to create increasingly more human-like, nuanced entities that can respond to and interact with actual humans.

One early use case for these agents has been gaming — specifically to use in games that support modifications (mods) like Minecraft. Voyager is one recent project, built on the Minedojo framework, that creates and develops Minecraft AI agents, and this, too, is where Altera is getting its start.

The company’s first product is an AI agent that can play Minecraft with you, “just like a friend” (the waitlist to try that out is here), but this seems 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 site. And after that? Robot dreams, it seems.

“Creating the human qualities required to turn co-pilots into co-workers and exploring a world where digital humans are given a physical form factor,” Altera explains.