Altera created a bot for Minecraft that is like a companion. Altera has raised $9 million to develop AI technology to create digital humans that behave in believable ways.
Los Angeles-based Altera (which is not the chip company you might otherwise know by the same name) has now raised a total of $11.1 million in funding since its inception in December 2023. This amount of funding for a company that is only five months old is pretty startling.
Led by Patron and First Spark Ventures, this round includes list of investors including A16z Speedrun, gaming industry luminary Mitch Lasky, and co-creator of Valorant, Stephen Lim. Other investors include Supercell executive board member Greg Harper, Duolingo chief business officer Bob Meese, Vertex Pharma co-founder Rich Aldrich, Vamos Ventures, Alumni Ventures and more.
“For my whole adult life, I’ve been building computer models of the brain,” said CEO Robert Yang. “I’m one of the early people to use modern deep neural networks to model the brain, which started out as very controversial and ended up very mainstream. Everyone does it. It’s kind of boring at this point.” GB Event
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He added, “I started my group at MIT about two and a half years ago, where we specialized in building what we call multi-system, neural network models of the brain. If you really want to model the brain, it’s not just about modeling vision, or action, or thinking, or language. You really need to put the whole thing together, model everything. So when the language models become more available, we jumped right on it and started to build these language model based models of the brain.”
The focus has been how to turn this product into something that people can use, Yang said.Altera’s mission is ambitious: to bridge the gap between artificial intelligence and human interaction by creating digital human beings. The brainchild of former MIT neuroscience professor Yang […]

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