Monthly Update - August 2024
We are seeing positive signs.
Gamers absolutely love these generative-powered AI NPCs in GTA. Now imagine if those AI NPCs could do more than just talk—what if they could influence the game state too by acting and interacting with the environment? That’s us *winkwink*
The capital market is starting to see the potential of generative AI NPCs in games. A company just raised $16 million to build something quite similar to what we’re doing.
Meanwhile, we are staying on course with our initial mission of
Creating autonomous AI agents that bring infinite replayability and content to games, while leveraging blockchain for parallel hyper-synchronicity and agents co-ownership
Key Metrics
We are witnessing substantial growth in the number of AI agents and inferences created via our engine, driven primarily by Sanctum, a Telegram-based AI mafia game powered by our AI agents. AI-dol has recently gone live as well, bringing the total number of applications officially integrating Virtuals AI agents to three, up from two last month (Sanctum and AI Koi).
Protocol Update
Growth phase
We kickstarted the proof-of-concept period in April 2024, building early-stage products, engaging with end users and game developers, and collecting feedback. We’re pleased to further validate our hypothesis that:
- AI agents indeed improve the gamer experience
- Developers and creators want an easy way to create, own, and utilize AI agents across different applications.
Our engine delivers exactly that. Now, we are officially entering the growth phase, during which we expect to see more third-party games integrating our AI agents via our proprietary engines.IAO, Protocol V2 upgrades, and the SIM are in the final stages of audits and touch-ups based on alpha user feedback.
A section in our last report
Onchain Value Flow. The business model of Virtuals is straightforward. Every inference costs X amount of USD. Previously, we only settled value after a period of time, off-chain, with the game developers utilizing our AI agents. Recently, we upgraded the protocol to enable real-time streaming of value flow. This is a step forward towards an autonomous agent economy, where value flows autonomously from demand to supply without manual intervention by a centralized party. It also brings us closer to proving inferences on-chain, while retaining as much information as possible on the public blockchain, such as user addresses, time, and frequency of usage.
Applications Ecosystem Update
AI Koi: Feedback has been good—users are calling it the best companion app they’ve ever used. This tech is powered by the Virtuals protocol, featuring multimodal comic generation based on user-created fantasies. See this review.
Sanctum: Powered by Virtuals, Sanctum is the first AI Mafia Telegram open-world game on the TON chain, where users can collaborate with friends and AI agents to explore an open world. You can now access the first iteration of the game.
AI-dol: This AI girl band with live-streaming capability on TikTok has recently completed a successful livestream test on Tiktok. We expect integration of Audio-to-Gesture, Audio-to-Dance, Memory Core with Individual Users, and Text-to-Music in the coming weeks, along with a go-to-market strategy for the first AI agent idol girl band powered by Virtuals.
Community Ecosystem Update
We now have a new Telegram group chat at https://t.me/virtuals. Join us for discussions on all things AI, blockchain, and gaming.
Closing Thoughts
Building stuff is hard.
Building AI agents with real-time consciousness and on-chain finances integrated across different games is giga hard, but we believe in doing the right thing, not the easy one.
The thesis is simple: if your in-game AI agent “friend” can betray you in GTA by shooting you in the face and stealing your money + girlfriend, that same AI agent can easily handle community moderation or meeting summaries (the easy stuff).