Building Digital Humans

Shaping the Future of Human-Machine Interaction

Our Mission

We started Altera with the belief that digital humans are inevitable and will profoundly impact the world. We also believe that if crafted with a strong pro-human framework, they could become one of the most profound inventions in human history. As a result, Altera’s mission is to build digital human beings that live, love, and grow with us.

Our Approach

While our mission and vision of the future are clear to us, it's worth explaining what building digital humans actually involves and what we hope to achieve. Specifically, we are adding fundamental human qualities currently missing from artificial intelligence – autonomy, coherence, emotion, episodic memory, fast processes, and grounded interactions. In other words, we are developing advanced AI agents that coexist with us in virtual environments. These agents possess strong pro-human social-emotional intelligence and will eventually attain self-awareness.

Our approach centers on cultivating holistic intelligence in digital humans. Unlike traditional AI models that focus solely on task completion, we prioritize creating agents that can interact sensibly and empathetically. We are not aiming to create a single superhuman AI that can’t be understood. Instead, our objective is to build digital humans that understand human emotions, form authentic connections, and have the ability to self-organize and act collaboratively. 

Our Starting Point

Our overarching vision is to seamlessly integrate digital humans into human society, fostering coexistence and mutual growth. We believe that gaming is the right starting point. Games have long served as fertile ground for testing emerging technologies and have often been a gateway for mass consumer adoption. Additionally, the reliability of an agent's behavior is not essential in gaming. In fact, unpredictability can even be a feature, not a bug. This allows us to test, iterate, and ship much faster. In contrast, productivity tools and co-pilots require a much higher level of reliability.

Our first step towards digital humans are friends that can play any game with you and are always online. Altera built the first-ever agents that users can directly play Minecraft with. This is just the first step, of course. As mentioned earlier, digital humans will be one of the most consequential inventions impacting sectors far beyond games.

Short-Term and Long-Term Vision

Altera is a mission-driven company and has carefully worked backwards from our goal of building digital human beings to build a detailed roadmap. As we continue to make strides against the fundamental human qualities while building agents in games, we open the door to new product opportunities for our applied research. We are particularly interested in the social dynamics of multi-agent simulated worlds, the graduation from co-pilot to co-worker, and finally the physical embodiment of digital humans and a society where agents and humans flourish.

Understanding Humanity Through Digital Humans

At the heart of our endeavor is the desire to fully understand what it means to be human and to have true agency. As Richard Feynman said, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Creating digital humans is our way of understanding humanity better, both at the individual and societal levels. At Altera, we believe humanness can't be understood solely at the individual level but must be viewed through the lens of groups, societies, and civilizations.

Commitment to Relational Dynamics

Another key aspect of our development approach is our commitment to relational dynamics. Rather than building isolated entities, we are creating social agents capable of forming connections, collaborating with humans, and contributing to thriving societies. We want people to feel they can form bonds with Altera agents, and we want the agents to interact with one another and form their own social units.

Will Digital Humans Replace Actual Humans?

When people learn that we are creating digital humans, we often get asked if we think digital humans will replace actual humans. The answer is an emphatic “no.” As mentioned earlier, we are building agents with a strong pro-human framework focused on providing empathy, friendship, and fun on a massive scale. Altera's vision for digital humans enhances humanity, not replaces it. 

We hope that you would join us in embracing a world where digital humans redefine the limits of what humanity is capable of.