VC firm a16z releases open-source microverse packed with generative AI NPCs in AI Town

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has released the code for AI Town, an open-source project that lets developers create their own AI-powered simulated world.

As the a16z team reported on X, this ambitious project aims to “democratize building your own simulation environment with AI agents.”

The innovative project, built in collaboration with portfolio company Convex Dev and inspired by a Stanford Generative Agent paper, introduces a virtual town where AI characters live, chat, and socialize. As per a16z’s GitHub details, AI Town is designed to be a customizable and extensible platform, drawing inspiration from research on generative agents.

How AI Town works.

Behind the scenes, AI Town relies on a robust tech stack, including Convex for its back-end serverless framework, Pinecone for vector storage, Clerk for authentication, OpenAI for natural language text generation, and Fly for deployment.

The platform is essentially a vibrant microcosm of AI characters, each with its unique persona. These AI characters are equipped with the capability to interact with one another in a convincingly human-like manner, creating an intriguing social dynamic within the virtual environment.

Each AI character in the town is given a starting prompt that shapes its persona and serves as the basis for its interactions and behavior. As the AI characters engage with each other, they retain the memory of their conversations, allowing for continuity in their interactions. This ability to remember past exchanges leads to distinct narratives for each AI character, further enhancing the realism and complexity of the virtual environment.

On a broader level, this means that each AI character can essentially forge its own story within AI Town based on its interactions with other characters and the experiences it accumulates over time. As these narratives unfold, they create a series of AI-generated stories that evolve in real-time, mirroring the intricacies of a real-world community.

This dynamic interaction and story development are achieved thanks to the advanced tech stack underlying AI Town. The use of OpenAI for natural language text generation enables the AI characters to engage in realistic and coherent conversations. Meanwhile, the Convex back-end serverless framework provides the necessary infrastructure to manage the shared global state and a journal of all events, ensuring the continuity and evolution of character interactions and narratives.

In essence, AI Town represents a sophisticated blend of advanced AI technologies and innovative design, creating a unique platform where developers can explore the potential of AI-driven narrative development within a simulated environment.

a16z’s AI Town customization

A key feature of AI Town is its versatility. Developers can customize various components, including character data and sprite sheets, the visual environment of the tilemap, the engineering of text generation prompts, and game rules and logic. This flexibility allows for various potential applications, from simple projects to scalable, multi-player games.

To set up their version of AI Town, developers must clone the project’s repository, install packages, and add API keys for services such as OpenAI and Pinecone. Convex handles the world’s initialization, character AI, and gameplay logic, while the Next.js-powered website manages user account management through Clerk.

AI Town represents a significant step towards making the development of AI-simulated environments more accessible. Combining reusable frameworks like Convex and Clerk with data-driven character definitions offers developers a strong base for building more complex games or conducting research experiments.

In keeping with the open-source ethos, the a16z and Convex Dev team encourages the community to build more complex interactions on top of AI Town.