AI avatars create their own world in virtual town simulation.

Researchers from Stanford University and Google created 25 AI avatars with different identities and let them loose in a virtual town called "Smallville" to see how they interacted with each other and their environment. The AI agents were able to produce believable individual and emergent social behaviors, such as making daily schedules, talking politics, going on dates, and even planning a party autonomously. The findings are considered "baby steps" towards achieving artificial general intelligence, but researchers caution that we need to be skeptical and question what AI tells us at face value.