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

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has released the code for AI Town, an open-source project that lets developers build their own simulated world populated by AI characters. The project was built in collaboration with portfolio company Convex Dev and is inspired by a Stanford Generative Agent paper. Its characters live, chat and socialize in a virtual town, retaining memories of past conversations, and the stack uses OpenAI for text generation, Convex as the back-end serverless framework, Pinecone for vector storage, Clerk for authentication and Fly for deployment. Developers can customize character data, sprite sheets, the tilemap, text generation prompts and game rules.