Why a16z Built a Town for AI People

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Turpentine is a network of podcasts, newsletters, and more, covering tech, business, and culture, all from the perspective of industry insiders and experts.
We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now.
At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from AI with Cognitive Revolution to Econ 102 with Noah Smith. Our other shows drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, and investors like Moment of Zen and my show Upstream. We're looking for industry leading hosts and shows along with sponsors. If you think that might be you or your company, email me at erikaturpentine.co. That's E-R-I-K at turpentine.co.

**Yoko Li** (0:46)
The previous project we've coded up, which is called Companion App, was based on this idea that AI can be served as companions and then as a human, you can talk to it about your problems or maybe have a conversation, learn things from the AI. The thing I did notice is when you try these things firsthand, you give these AI companions life by giving it more details. What do they like? Do they prefer diet coke or real coke? It's all the ditty gritty details you would have in an actual friend or human, and then over time, since we implemented the memory implementation, they really remember everything, every interaction you had with it.
That project, after we launched it, obviously, the community came together, came around it, and then we started to get questions around like, okay, this is great to have one-on-one conversations.
What about having the AI as part of a group? What happens when you play games with the AI?

**Nathan Labenz** (1:41)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Eric Thornburg. Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, we have a fascinating conversation about how quickly AI research ideas are moving to practical implementation, and what that might imply for a world full of AI populated simulations.
Programmers, and partners at a16z, Yoko Li, and Martin Casado, teamed up with James Cowling, CTO of development platform Convex, to create an interactive simulation of human behavior using AI agents, which they call AI Town. This implementation was based on the recent Stanford paper, Generative Agents, Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior, in which researchers introduced a new simulation framework, which was headlined, in my view, by a novel memory structure, which combines direct observational memories with higher-level reflection memories, which are periodically generated over time, such that the AI agents were able to effectively navigate their virtual town, have coherent conversations with one another, and even make and execute plans together. The open-source version of this project now runs on TypeScript development platform Convex, where a single shared runtime processes all the many LLM API calls and other asynchronous events that come together to create the virtual town.
Coming into this conversation, I imagined that this project must reflect an investment thesis at a16z related to AI simulations. But what I learned is that this project is actually just more playful and experimental than all that. Because modern development platforms like Convex make it so easy to build such things, it now often takes months, weeks, or even just days for academic research to start popping up in applications.
And I do see this as a sign of things to come. It's been maybe a year since LLMs really started passing the Turing test. And already people spend hours a day on character AI, where the number one use case, by the way, is romantic roleplay. And meanwhile, Inflections Pi has exchanged 1 billion messages with users. That's roughly 10 million per day in its first 100 days. Now, we're seeing speech synthesis and video deepfakes that are sometimes legitimately hard to distinguish from the real thing. So with simulation frameworks like AI Town becoming more accessible, it seems almost inevitable that we'll soon have a wide range of simulated, AI populated worlds to explore. As always, often for better, but in some cases, for worse. Now if you want to understand the technology underlying these developments more deeply and you haven't already, I really suggest you check out my AI Scouting Report, which is available on the Cognitive Revolution YouTube channel. We made this episode a YouTube-only feature because the visuals are really critical. And while I think this is some of the most valuable content that we've created, and our reviewers seem to agree, part one just hit 3,000 views, which is significantly less than our typical podcast downloads. So please, check it out, and if you have a friend that's trying to get up to speed on AI as quickly as possible without relying on misleading metaphors, maybe send it to them as well.