Introducing Fundamental Research Labs

New name, same mission, and our next chapter

Altera.AL is now officially "Fundamental Research Labs."

Our mission to build digital human beings with every fundamental human quality remains unchanged. In fact, we are closer than ever to our goal. Our agents have expanded beyond games and into our daily lives on computers.

A lot goes into a company name—what it means, whom it serves, and what feelings it evokes.

We’d like to briefly share how we came up with our old name, Altera, and why we decided to become Fundamental.

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From LyfeGame to Altera.AL

MetaConscious Lab, MIT, Nov 2023

Our very first name was LyfeGame. Within a few months, it became clear that this name doesn’t reflect our mission of building digital humans that live, care, and grow with us. So the co-founders spent two hours throwing every name we remotely liked on the board. We generated over 30 possibilities, vetoed any name that any co-founder disliked, and then each voted on the remaining candidates.

Altera won with unanimous 4/4 yes votes¹. Its Latin root, "alter," meaning "other" or "second," felt fitting with our goal of building a new kind of person. We also wanted our company to usher humanity into a new “era”. Its beginning, “AL,” was especially meaningful to us, evoking the concept of Artificial Life. While it doesn’t directly reference our roots in computational neuroscience or our dedication to research, Altera captured something essential. It felt true to who we are and what we're building. In December 2023, we re-registered our company as Altera.AL.

Our plan has always been to start in games and go everywhere. So we first focused on AI Agents in Minecraft. We built a team of dreamers, who love research that feels imaginative but also entirely inevitable — and games have been a great playground for that. Within several months, we became known as the one of leading Agent companies in games.

However, in early 2024, Intel spun off its Altera FPGA chip company it acquired nearly a decade ago and asked us to consider restricting our use of Altera to within games. So whenever we start to build more general-purpose agents beyond games, we would need a new name.

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Computer-Use Agents

On October 22, 2024, Anthropic released its CUA (Computer-Use Agent) preview and reported their performance on the OSWorld benchmark. Within days, we realized that while computer-using agents remained premature at the time, there is a small time window to make them truly valuable.

We gave ourselves one month to focus on OSWorld, the most important public benchmark for agent computer use. OSWorld is to general computer work what SWE-bench is to software engineering.

Towards the end of November 2024, our performance on OSWorld reached around 48%, far higher than anyone else at the time. This was achieved under 15 steps (the original requirement), and using the accessibility tree. We never publicized this result partly to not draw attention. More importantly, a relatively high benchmark score may not translate to real user values². In this case, the tasks in OSWorld (mostly Linux, low human-interaction, GUI-focused) were not sufficiently in distribution with our intended product experience, so we shifted our focus to internal benchmarks and our new product Fairies.

At the end of November 2024, our OSWorld performance was pretty good

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Fundamental Research Labs

This week, we are coming out of 6 months of stealth development to share Fairies with you. And with that, we are also sharing our new name: Fundamental Research Labs—“Fundamental” for short.

Feels inevitable

Our new name combines all our favorite elements: the fact that building digital humans would require fundamental research, our start in games (fun), our root in neuroscience (mental), and of course it ends with AL³.

Today with Fairies, you can work and interact with the best general purpose agent that lives on your machine. Soon you’ll be able to work with a thousand of them. One day they will grow beyond the computer and achieve true embodiment.

Our goal at Fundamental Research Labs is to build digital human beings—an accomplishment that necessitates building one of the most consequential companies in human history along the way.

Fundamental Research Labs, Inc.

1. We almost became BrainCraft (3 votes) or Anim.AL (2 votes)

2. Like getting 13% on SWE-bench when others were at 4%. It’s cool but not enough.

3. As well as our need for funding (fund) and how building digital humans is a bit crazy (mental)