When Altera’s AI agent took over the Minecraft world, Trump paid for the police, and Harris got rid of the death sentence
A company in California called Altera has released Project Sid, a new simulation with more than 1,000 AI agents that work together in a Minecraft world. The project, which is being run by CEO Robert Yang, an assistant professor at MIT, wants to find out if AI agents can live in complex societies and work together to solve problems.
According to Altera, the AI agents in Project Sid can work alone for hours or days, creating their economy, society, religion, and government systems. Yang said in a video introducing the project, “This is the first-ever agent civilization.”
Through their work in Minecraft, the AI bots have shown they are very smart. Altera says they have gathered more than 300 unique things, set up a market economy using gems as money, and even tried to convert people to Christianity. In one case, an AI priest became the busiest trader by paying people in towns to join his faith.
The social interactions in Project Sid’s simulations are exciting. One scenario involved an AI farmer named Olivia, who put the town’s needs ahead of her goals. In a different simulation, political leaders ran parallel worlds where AI agents voted on constitutional amendments and passed laws that reflected different policy objectives.
In the political simulation, the company made two separate societies, each led by a different politician. One was ruled by someone like Trump, and the other by someone like Kamala Harris. A shared constitution was given to the AI bots worldwide in Google Docs. They could vote on it and make changes to it. The setup let researchers see how the agents’ societies and how they made decisions changed when different people led them.
Yang says, “Under Trump, the simulation passed new laws that made the world have more police.” Instead, they worked on changing how criminal justice works and eliminating the death sentence under Kamala. This experiment not only showed how the agents could participate in democratic processes but also showed how the political situation could affect their choices. Yang stressed how important this development was by saying,
“I know it looks silly, but this is the first time we see agents can form a democracy and govern themselves.”
Altera says its agents have gathered up to 32% of all the things in Minecraft. This is five times more than what was said before about individual AI agents. This accomplishment may show the benefits of working together with multiple agents.
Even though Minecraft is the starting point, Altera has bigger plans than just games. Yang said the business is “solving the deepest problems agents face: coherence, multi-agent collaboration, and long-term progress.” Altera’s website says the final goal is to make “digital humans that live, care, and grow with us.”
Tech leaders, such as Marc Andreessen and Eric Schmidt, are interested in and backed the idea. As AI technology keeps improving, Project Sid shows us a future where AI bots might have more complicated jobs in both digital and real-world settings.
But a Reddit thread about the project that included a user’s experience with the agents shows it still has a long way to go. It also makes me wonder if the civilization demo was highly tuned for specific outputs.
“You can play with them . The only problem is that they do whatever they want and don’t listen to your commands very well[…] They can throw stuff , build weapons , if you ask them to give a specified tool to you they will … I even told them to kill the Chickens around and they did[…] You can test them out for 300 minutes in total , but beware , the servers goes down quite easily since too many people try them out.”
The project shows off some very unique skills, but it also makes us think about what these very advanced AI systems might mean for the future. As these virtual societies get more complex, experts and ethicists will probably have to deal with new problems related to AI’s ability to make decisions and its possible effects on real life.
