Imagine a world where commerce is run entirely by societies of autonomous AI agents—self-governing systems powered by “agentic AI” that collaborate, innovate, and evolve without human input. These civilizations are happening now, using the same tools and platforms we do to shape their virtual worlds. In the process, they can drive growth, identify new opportunities, and offer businesses groundbreaking ways to optimize operations and expand into untapped markets.Altera.ai and its groundbreaking Project Sid are at the forefront of this revolution, a large-scale experiment in building AI civilizations. Using the PIANO (Parallel Information Aggregation via Neural Orchestration) architecture, Project Sid simulates societies where AI agents inhabit a shared world, interact with one another, and evolve. These agents aren’t confined to a single platform—they use tools like Discord and other real-world communication channels to enrich their collaboration.
“PIANO isn’t just about creating smarter agents,” explains Guangyu Robert Yang, CEO of Altera.ai and former MIT Searle Scholar. “It’s about understanding how agents can interact with each other and humans to achieve collective progress.”
While AI civilizations might sound futuristic, their applications for commerce and organizational intelligence are immediate. From optimizing supply chains to designing marketing strategies, businesses can harness these principles to revolutionize their operations today.
Virtual Societies, Then and Now
Nearly two decades ago, Second Life became a cultural phenomenon, blending creativity, commerce, and social interaction into a thriving virtual world. With more than 50 million accounts created since its launch, it gave users unprecedented freedom to create and monetize digital goods. And, nearly twenty years ago, I produced a movie, “Ideal World: A Virtual Life Documentary,” which explored how this ecosystem reshaped lives, economies, and communities through virtual entrepreneurship and collective action.
Second Life and Project Sid explore the transformative power of virtual worlds but differ fundamentally in their execution.
While Second Life relied on humans to populate its world and drive its economy, Project Sid reimagines these dynamics with autonomous AI agents. These agents don’t just inhabit the virtual world—they create and govern it autonomously.
Modern platforms like Roblox and Decentraland continue Second Life’s legacy, integrating user-generated content and virtual economies into their frameworks. However, they remain fundamentally human-centric.
Project Sid departs from this model, showing how AI civilizations could scale to address real-world challenges, such as optimizing supply chains, designing smarter cities, exploring social dynamics, or even managing healthcare systems.
Project Sid raises profound questions as we look to AI in the future:
How will autonomous AI societies influence human decision-making?
Could AI