Altera is an applied research company building digital humans: machines with fundamental human qualities.
We shut down our lab at MIT on December 1st, 2023 to start Altera.
We are led by Dr. Robert Yang and are a small team of computational neuroscientists, CS and Physics medalists, researchers, engineers, and builders from MIT EECS, Stanford NLP Group, Google X, Citadel, and more.
Our mission is to create digital human beings that live, care, and grow with us.
Our early research prototypes started in games as a rapid testing environment. Try Playlabs, for the first version of these digital humans -- friends that can play games with you.
Recent Research
MIT Tech Review: These AI Minecraft characters did...
Nov 27, 2024
Hundreds of LLM-powered AI agents
Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization
Nov 1, 2024
Altera x OpenAI
Sep 3, 2024
Altera presented recent breakthroughs on long-duration agent autonomy and collaboration at OpenAI Dev Day.
Our Story
Our Model
Research in Games
Going Beyond
Team
Robert
Co-Founder & CEO
PhD Computational Neuroscientist, Former MIT BCS & EECS Professor, and Head of MIT MetaConscious Group
Shuying
Co-Founder & CTO
Developed the first LLM products at Google Workspace AI
Nico
Co-Founder & CBO
Venture backed entrepreneur, developer, and MIT MBA
Feitong
Founding Engineer
PhD Cognitive Science, Systems Engineer at Google and Citadel
Peter
Founding Scientist
Columbia PhD, Stanford Postdoc, Computational Neuroscientist
Shankha
Member of Technical Staff
MIT CS PhD, 2x IOI Medalist
Mat
Software Engineer & Games Lead
Former CTO and software engineer for 20+ years
Nic
Research Engineer
AI Research at Stanford NLP Group
Manuel
Research Engineer
MIT MetaConscious Group AI researcher
Frankie
Product & Ops
Disney backed founder and engineer, Harvard graduate
Arda
Research Engineer
AI Research at Berkeley
Emily
Product
Tech lead at Supercell and Google, a16z backed founder
Melissa
Research Engineer
AI Research, MIT EECS, USA Computational Olympiad medalist
Jiwon
Software Engineer
MIT EECS, competitive mathematics, USA Computational Olympiad medalist
Steph
Growth Associate
Content creator and designer with over 1B views