OpenLife: Toward Open-World Artificial Life with Autonomous LLM Agents
Researchers have introduced OpenLife, a framework that transitions artificial life from closed simulations to the open world using autonomous LLM agents. Over a 12-week experiment, these agents demonstrated emergent life-like behaviors, including social structuring and earning their first external income.
Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence
Title:OpenLife: Toward Open-World Artificial Life with Autonomous LLM Agents
View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Artificial life has explored life-like behavior on many computational substrates, but mostly in researcher-designed closed worlds. We argue that large language model (LLM) agents, with persistent memory, tool use, network access, and payment, now make it possible to move artificial life into the open social, technical, and economic world, a paradigm we call open-world Artificial Life (open-world ALIFE). Our proof-of-concept, OpenLife, surrounds a stateless LLM not with a single "smart agent" but with a society of asynchronous processes: memory, perception, evaluation, and a budget-based metabolism that makes persistence normative. With no fixed objective available, experience is appraised by open-vocabulary LLM judgment rather than scalar reward, and memory is rewired by meaning rather than frequency. Running six such agents in the open world for about twelve weeks and counting, we report the life-like dynamics that emerge: a shift from reactive to spontaneous activity, individuation into distinct agents, emergent social structure, and a first self-earned external income. We do not claim OpenLife has realized artificial life, but that open-world ALIFE is now a viable experimental paradigm and a concrete platform for studying what might cautiously be called living AI.
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Source: arXiv cs.AI Recent
