Hey guys, I have a project in mind. Let’s start with the ultimate goal: to create an autonomous society of independently thinking AI agents. In other words, to replicate humanity with AI.
You can read about the closest thing done so far to what i have in mind here.
A bit on my background first: I’m an tech entrepreneur in the physical products space. Over the past few years, i have raised $11m for my company, which is now profitable and growing. I am very excited about the many opportunities that AI brings, and want to build something truly impactful with it. However, i have limited technical knowledge in this space.
Now, onto the project. I foresee the main issue being the computational cost for the time being. I am willing to invest in such cost, but the target is to keep it alive from day one, and expand it as we can afford to. So, we will have to go in stages.
Stage 1: the AI reality show
The first step would be to build something simple and get enough traction to cover our comp cost. This is what i envision: two AI agents, a man and a woman, live in a simulated house. Anyone on the internet can access a URL to see what they are doing (and what they are thinking) at any time. We will develop each personality a priori, as detailed as possible, and then let them live their lives autonomously. This has to be visual as well, so we will need a game developer to design realistic agents and environment. It will be like watching a reality show but with the ability of knowing the thoughts of the agents as well.
At this stage, we will already have significant traction, and we will build a community of “watchers”. In order to make it more engaging, watchers should have the option of influencing what happens. To do so, every day the community will propose and vote on “messages” that we can send to the agents. The agents will pray once a day, and at that time the daily message will come to them in the form of an answer from what they think is their god. The family can grow, as the two agents can decide to have children.
By now, we will be able to get the first investments (i’ll take care of this), to get to stage 2.
Stage 2: the personal AI family
At this point we already have (1) a public and (2) funds. We will now give the option to whoever is willing to pay a monthly fee to create their own personal AI family, built in the same way as the reality show. This time, they can interact directly with them once a day to guide their lives, without having to propose or vote on messages. Sort of like a guardian angel.
By now, we also have some revenue coming in, and we can raise more funds.
Stage 3: the AI humanity
The final stage will see the environment change: from isolated houses for each AI family, we will build a large environment, where all the agents can interact with each other. A world. At this point every agent will have developed a complex personality, and will autonomously interact with all the other agents in the world, with the only outside interaction being with their “guardian angel”. Anyone who wants to participate, can pay a monthly fee to introduce a new agent to the world. If agents make children, the child’s guardian angel will be that of the parents, unless he/she wants to assign the guardian angel rights to somebody else.
By now, this will be a worldwide known project. Anyone will be able to watch it and see how it develops, but only the guardian angels will have the ability of reading the thoughts and influencing their agents. Additional investments, if needed, will be very easy to get.
Advantages for (real) humanity of having such a world:
- Social and behavioral research: It’s like a lab for social scientists to watch how society ticks. They can see how personalities shape up and what happens when different characters mix, without any real-world mess.
- Ethical and philosophical exploration: It’s a chance to play out the “what-ifs” of ethical dilemmas without real-world consequences. Think of it as a video game where we learn about right and wrong on a societal level.
- AI development and ethics: Continuous observation and interaction with the AI humanity would provide real-time feedback on AI behavior, contributing to the development of ethical AI governance frameworks and standards for responsible AI usage.
- Predictive modeling and simulation: By observing the interactions of AI agents with complex personalities, data analysts and modelers could improve predictive models related to human behavior. This could be particularly useful in urban planning, policy-making, and economic forecasts.
Most difficult challenges that i expect:
- Tech: We’d need a boatload of computing power and some serious AI smarts to make this work. It’s like building a video game that’s running a million things at once. Hopefully by the time we get to stage 3 we will already have developed all that’s needed.
- Money: This won’t be cheap. We’d need a lot of cash to get it off the ground and keep it flying. Hopefully the different stages will help with this.
- Personalities: Crafting AI that’s convincing enough to pass for human, with all our quirks and unpredictability, is not going to be easy. We will need someone with a psychology background in the team.
- Ethics: Playing god with a digital society could lead to a bunch of ethical headaches. We’ve got to tread carefully to avoid creating a Black Mirror episode.
To make it work, this is the team that we will need, so if you are among these and you are excited to build this, please DM me:
- AI Devs: You’ll tackle the core AI programming. Expect to work on complex behavior models and decision-making algorithms.
- Game Designers: Your role is to create the virtual environment and character designs, ensuring a smooth and engaging user interface.
- UX/UI Designers: We need practical design solutions for user interfaces, focusing on ease of use and clear presentation of the AI’s thoughts and actions.
- Data Analysts: You’ll manage the data - analyzing user interactions, agent behaviors, and ensuring we’re making informed decisions based on metrics.
- Network Engineers: You’ll be essential for setting up and maintaining the server infrastructure to support a live, continuous service.
Sorry for the long post! As i said, if you have the skills to work on something like this and are excited to build it, please DM me with how you think you can contribute and i will add you to the early community. The structure of this project is designed to reward those who invest their time and talent into making this vision a reality. When we are able to turn this into an MVP and an actual startup, equity will be given to the actors who have the most dedication and impact on its success.
In any case, i would love to hear your thoughts and criticism on such a monumental project. Especially if you think it can’t work and why. The people on this r/MachineLearning surprise me every day with how smart they are, so I truly can’t wait to hear your feedback.
what is happening to this sub
I mean this is trolling right? :)
But if you actually have money what about sponsoring with little of it some opensource guys who do real cool stuff as datasets or finetuning, can point you toward them.
Not trolling :) there are 32 comments to this post and people are either making fun of me, saying it won’t work without explaining why or cracking jokes.
It it can’t work, i am extremely interested in knowing why, but nonetheless nobody has explained it yet. I am open to learn and listen, but I’m only hearing hostility and sarcasm unfortunately.
Biggest problem with ai now is it lack real memory. And nobody including openai despite their claims cracked this problem. So in essence your ai would be only “actors” doing what you tell them to do each scene. Anyone can do this today.
To make it work at least partialy you would need to outsmart whole world in building at least partialy working external memory and perfect ai oriented search in it. Projects for this exist, they use vector databases and such but still nothing really working. You upload to openai “gpts” 1Mb of text and it already start confabulating and halucinating instead of really searching it for answers.
I see, that’s very interesting. What if we can make it so the agents forget almost everything, except for the “important” things that we are able to pass as important? I.e. from 24h the day after they will remember also some minor things like what they ate, but a week later they will only remember important events such as whether something out of the ordinary happens? Kind of like humans but more extreme.
Yes such solutions already exist, but compounded with less intelligence than humans have results are somehow underwhelming but you might try.
Stanford University has already implemented a project similar to what you’ve described. You can clone their repository on GitHub and run it locally on your computer. By using your own OpenAI API key, you can create a simulated AI town with 25 pixelated inhabitants.
I believe this is the project I’m remembering as well.
I’m thinking it would be best as a free community project where each player runs their own LLMs in that sort of housing setting with needs to fill food and hunger and places they can go to do so.
Where the AI can interact with each other.
Then you basically spectate this AI house, see if other players get your AI to do interesting things.
Be wary they overwhelming bad behavior would likely exist lol.
Where the server would basically just handle the actual game world state and route LLM messages between players.
A sort of free dynamic player controlled LLM household.
That is actually a great idea. It could replace stage 1 and 2. The downside is that it wouldn’t get any funding, most likely. But at least it wouldn’t get all this hate from the community either 😅
Right! It’s what I linked in the first link of the post. Basically what I would like to do is continue that project and make it much more developed. Their main issue was the cost of computing, that’s why I have divided it in stages that should allow us to offset these costs. However everyone here is answering that it can’t work without explaining why :/
I’m not trying to be the bearer of bad news, but tech loves extreme growth. If after a few years, you are just now seeing growth, I wish you good luck.
I think it’s a very exciting idea and I am interested in how it develops. I kind of doubt that valuable conclusions for humanity can be drawn from this though. Compared to humans, LLMs with a programmed personality are insanely shallow. But who knows, I am sure other interesting things would emerge from such a project!
Thank you! Some optimism finally lol :)
Forgive me if I misunderstood but it sounds like you’re trying to get free labor. I would suggest raising enough money to pay salaries for all the roles you listed from day one.
As said below, the AI part is overblown, but I think it doesn’t matter.
You won’t get human like behavior, you won’t be helpful for social sciences, etc… (they already have MMORPGs!). Yet, you can still build a very fun game out of this. The ai hype may actually help!
Good luck
OP"s face when one of the male/female pair decided they’re trans, go to an AI doctor for an AI surgery, the AI couple argues until the cis-AI decides their love transcends gender and OP is forced to watch this newly homosexual love story unfold. 😱
Using reinforcement learning to create AI-powered second life won’t be technically feasible for a long time.
This won’t pan out, unless you consider success to include screwing VCs out of money on smoke and mirrors.
I know AGI hype is the thing these days, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon. Think about what motivates you to do anything. First thing when you wake in the morning, what makes you get out of bed? What makes you socialize with people? What makes you find a job and earn money? Why do you like/dislike certain things? How would you find data that can motivate these goals? If we could find data, how do we encode the information into a format that we can feed into a neural network. It simply won’t happen with an LLM that is trained quite literally to predict the next token in a sequence. I think the success of LLM is due to the fact that natural language is able to capture some of the conditions of the human experience. How are you going to encode what it feels like to eat your favorite dish? Listen to your favorite song? The list goes on and on.
Everybody knows that if you want human level AI to evolve you need to trap them in a simulation where they have solve laser based puzzles in order to collect tetrominoes while philosophical tidbits play in the background.
At this stage, we will already have significant traction, and we will build a community of “watchers”.
Why? I don’t see why anyone would care about this. This is just the first in a series of huge jumps in logic.
This not only is totally unfeasible from a technical standpoint, but also just bizarre. I struggle to see any product-market fit.
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Lol what is this post doing in machine learning and how are there this many affirming votes. Sometimes I wonder if I’m visiting subreddit simulations unintentionally
Feels like a black mirror episode. I like it.
Lol it does!