Just as automation helps increase human capacity by supporting repetitive tasks, digital humans—the Altera team believes—will be able to collaborate productively and even form bonds with people. This may look like:

But Altera ran into unique challenges as they set out to build. The most pressing issue was the phenomenon of data degradation, a problem that plagues all AI models making autonomous decisions in extended timeframes.

“AI agents interact with the world, making decisions in real-time, but as their own output becomes their future input, the data quality degrades over time,” Yang explains. “This is an issue most AI Agent systems encounter, but for our digital humans, who are meant to live autonomously for hours or even longer, this becomes one of the most pressing issues to solve.”

To combat data degradation and increase the long-term autonomy of their AI agents, Altera turned to OpenAI’s language models, which proved pivotal in maintaining the integrity of decision-making processes.