AI Town: The Virtual World Where AI-Powered Characters Come to Life

Imagine a world where AI-powered characters can live, chat, and socialize with each other, free from the constraints of pre-scripted instructions. Welcome to AI Town, a virtual world that’s been making waves in the large language modeling ecosystem.

A virtual world where AI-powered characters come to life

Developed by VC firm a16z on top of the Convex platform backend, AI Town is an always-active Sims-like virtual world where characters are free to do whatever they like. Unlike the Sims, which have always seemed on the dumber side of AI, AI Town’s inhabitants have a degree of free will, holding conversations with one another, investigating the world they inhabit, and building relationships that inform their character.

“AI Town is designed as a showcase for interactive LLM characters and is available open source to adapt or run as-is on your computer.” - a16z

The virtual world is built from a research paper published by Google and Stanford that used GPT-3.5 to simulate AI agents living in a small digital town based on prompts to the bot. Each of these agents was in control of a character’s mind with a defined occupation and personality. Over time, as the characters interacted with the world and others, they also developed relationships and saw their personalities evolve.

AI Town characters, each with their own unique personality and occupation

Now, the underlying code can be easily installed and run on a MacBook thanks to a local version of the Convex platform. It uses a local installation of Meta’s Llama 3 to power each of the characters, and you can click any of them to find their self-developed bio and see who they’ve spoken to and what was said.

The Future of Gaming?

AI Town is more than just a fun game; it’s a showcase for the potential of AI in gaming. Imagine a future Sims game powered by an LLM controlling the decisions of each Sim, allowing them to hold conversations with each other, grow, and potentially refuse your instructions.

“AI Town is a way to put different language models through their paces, and it’s an always active Sims-like virtual world where the characters are free to do whatever they like.” - a16z

How to Play AI Town

There are two ways to play with AI Town. First, you can visit the AI Town website, click interact, and get going in the world already running for the rest of the world. This is easy to start but gives you relatively little control over the world.

The other method is to get it running on your local device. You’ll want at least 16GB of RAM, and it will only currently work on Mac or Linux - there is no Windows support. To make the process even easier, Pinokio.Computer maker Cocktail Peanut has created a one-click installer for the game. It installs all the necessary code and gives you a link to start playing in your browser. You can customize the world, set initial prompts, and watch as it grows.

The one-click installer for AI Town makes it easy to get started

AI Town is not just a fun game; it’s a useful tool to show the power of AI agents, widely regarded as the next big leap for LLMs after chat. Agents would allow the AI to go off and perform tasks on its own, such as booking hotels for the user, making calendar appointments, or firing off the nukes (joke - hopefully!).