We build machines with fundamental human qualities, starting with friends that can play video games with you.
Dr. Robert Yang, CEO & Co-Founder
Previously: PhD Computational Neuroscientist, MIT BCS and EECS Professor, and Head of the MIT MetaConscious Group. Robert shut down his lab and left tenure-track at MIT to start Altera.
We are a small but talent-dense team of computational neuroscientists, physics olympiads, and engineers from MIT EECS, Stanford NLP Group, Google X, Citadel, Supercell, and more.
Our mission is to create digital human beings that live, care, and grow with us.
We believe digital beings and digital relationships will enhance, not replace, human-to-human interactions. As digital humans come to vastly outnumber us, they should become a source of empathy, fun, friendship, and productivity at an unprecedented scale.
Our state-of-the-art agents are powered by our Systems Neuroscience Composite Architecture — a system of systems inspired by the brain, with models mirroring the prefrontal cortex, memory systems, social-emotional states, and more.
Composite AI architectures are becoming the primary way to build agents, but they are still very challenging to build/train, and this is especially true for multi-agent and consumer focused products which require modules like empathy, memory, social norms, etc.
This is where our background in AI and Neuroscience is a crucial advantage. The brain is the only validated model for human-level agents and we fundamentally understand it better than other technology companies.
Scroll through the video below for a partial, abstracted view.
Altera is an applied research lab building its first products in games.
Building in games allows us to iterate in virtual worlds, build strong data flywheels, and ship products where the consequences for frontier limitations are limited and where emergent behaviors could be features, not bugs.
Our first digital human being products are friends that can play Minecraft with you and are always online.
The science problems we are solving in games -- coherence, long-term autonomy and progression, collaboration, episodic memory, etc. generalize far beyond games.
We will expand into multi-agent simulations, multi-agent workforces, and eventually physical embodiment of digital intelligence.
We intend to build the most consequential technology company in the world.
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Andrew Previously: MIT Math PhD, Led theoretical deep learning research at the MIT MetaConscious Group |
Shuying Previously: Developed the first LLM products at Google Workspace AI |
Nico Previously: Venture backed entrepreneur, developer, and MIT MBA |
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Feitong Previously: PhD Cognitive Science, Systems Engineer at Google and Citadel |
Peter Previously: Columbia PhD, Stanford Postdoc, Computational Neuroscientist |
Mat Previously: CTO, Creative Director, Games developer for 20+ years |
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Jimmy Previously: Led growth and new games at Supercell for 10 years |
Nic Previously: AI Research at Stanford NLP Group |
Manuel Previously: MIT MetaConscious Group AI researcher |
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Frankie Previously: Founder and developer, recent Harvard graduate |
Arda Previously: AI Research at Berkeley |
Emily Previously: Tech lead at Supercell and Google, a16z backed founder |
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Melissa Previously: AI Research, MIT EECS, USA Computational Olympiad medalist |
Wei Previously: Quant trader and Berkeley MS |
Building human-like agents requires world-class scientists, engineers, and product builders. We purposefully built our team around this core belief.
Teams must have the scientific muscle to discover unknown unknowns, establish proprietary benchmarks, run evaluations at the speed of ideas, and execute ruthlessly against them.
Our team works together, in-person, because that is what it takes to create continuous scientific discovery and to build first-of-its-kind products.
We shut down our lab on December 1st, 2023. By the new year we had raised $2M pre-seed, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Three months later we raised a $9M seed round led by Eric Schmidt's First Spark Ventures, Patron VC, and angel investors Mitch Lasky (GP @ Benchmark and games industry leader), Bob Meese (CBO @ Duolingo), Stephen Lim (Co-Founder @ Valorant), and more.
We set up shop in Menlo Park in May 2024 and we are working towards shipping the first agent consumer product and a variety of other endeavors.