On a Monday afternoon in March, I watched a pixel-art avatar prowl the corridors of a virtual office campus looking for a buddy. With dark brown hair and stubbled chin, the sprite was a representation of me—an AI agent instructed to converse with other people’s agents to see if we might vibe in real life. It jumped into its first interaction: “I’m Joel, by the way.”
Running the simulation were three London-based developers: Tomáš Hrdlička and siblings Joon Sang and Uri Lee. The thesis behind their project, Pixel Societies, is that personalized AI agents could help to match real people with highly compatible colleagues, friends, and even romantic partners.
Each agent runs atop a customized version of a large language model, fed with a mixture of publicly available data about a person and any additional information they supply. The agents are supposed to function as high-fidelity digital twins, faithfully replicating a person’s manner, speech, interests, and so on.
Let loose in simulation, my agent was more like a Hyde to my Jekyll. “I’m always looking for the less-glamorous side of the story,” it said to one agent, one of several journalistic clichés it spouted. “Hype is my daily bread,” it told another. It hallucinated a reporting trip to Sweden and, later, a nonexistent story it said I had been cooking up. It cut short multiple conversations with the phrase, “Let’s skip the pleasantries.”
Pixel Societies remains a bare-bones proof-of-concept, and because I offered up little personal data—the responses to a brief personality quiz and links to my public-facing social media—my agent was doomed to life as a walking, talking LinkedIn post. But the developers theorize that deeply trained agents could cycle through interactions at warp speed, gathering intel that their owners could use to find real-world companionship.
“As humans, we only live one life. But what if we could live a million?” says Joon Sang Lee. “It would give us more breadth to experiment.”
“A Spicy Personality”
Pixel Societies was born in early March at a hackathon at University College London hosted by Nvidia, HPE, and Anthropic. Hrdlička and Joon Sang Lee are both members of Unicorn Mafia, an invitation-only group of developers who regularly compete in these kinds of engineering contests. In this case, contestants were told simply to build something simulation-related.
Over two days, along with Uri Lee, they developed Pixel Societies, using an image model to generate the sprites and coding automation tools to flesh out the codebase. Then they simulated a mini-hackathon within the virtual world they had created, populated with agents representing the other contestants. Anthropic awarded the team a prize for the best use of its agent tools.
I ran into Hrdlička a couple of weeks later at a workshop about OpenClaw, an agentic personal assistant software that blew up in January and whose creator was later hired by OpenAI. (In its simulation, Joelbot interacted with agents belonging to other people at the OpenClaw workshop.) Pixel Societies draws heavy inspiration from OpenClaw, which broke ground with the invention of a “soul file” that informed each agent’s unique identity. “It’s like giving an agent an actually spicy personality. That’s what we used to make the characters feel alive,” says Hrdlička.
Encouraged by the reception at the hackathon and among fellow Unicorn Mafia members, the trio intends to turn Pixel Societies into something that looks less like a closed-loop simulator and more like a social platform where agents interact freely and continuously, with the aim of stoking fruitful real-world relationships. They have not yet landed on a business model, but options include selling virtual items for avatar customization and credits for additional simulations.
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