User-generated content-building platform Luda has secured $7 million in funding and has revealed its new system for Real-Time Reinforcement Learning (RT-RL) which enables a new category of creative expression and social experiences.
The funding is led by Bitkraft and Compound with participation from Jeff Dean and Illia Polosukhin, and will enable Luda to commit to democratising AI through play by allowing anyone to create, train and launch their own AI agents through a sandbox experience.
Led by industry veterans from Google Research, Disney and Zynga, Luda is focused on putting the power to create AI agents into people’s hands through Mels, a real-time browser-based simulation that harnesses the power of generative AI to animate imaginative creations.
Luda founder and CEO Vijay Sundaram says, “At Luda, we believe people belong at the centre of AI – not the other way around. That’s why we’re building UGC gameplay for the AI generation. The exciting thing about technology paradigm shifts is the chance to create fundamentally new experiences that weren’t possible before.”
Creating a new consumer category
“We started researching and developing novel generative AI techniques like RT-RL five years ago in Google Research, to create a new consumer category: immersive, interactive AI agents anyone can create through an experience that’s as accessible and joyful as play – a new kind of playground bringing together human creativity, social connection, and user-generated agents,” added Sundaram.
Once crafted, Luda’s RT-RL aims to bring creations to life with real-world physics, while Mels offers interactive and emergent scenarios with creative possibilities, without the need for coding or manual animation. Users can assemble characters, or AI agents, from building blocks in a digital sandbox.
Scott Rupp, partner at Bitkraft Ventures said, “Luda isn’t just building an IP, game or platform, but developing an entirely new creative medium, one that empowers every user to truly craft AI agents through Lego-like building blocks. Just as Minecraft and Roblox ushered in a new era of active creativity and UGC, Luda is poised to introduce a fundamentally new category of social and immersive experiences.”
The rapid growth of AI gives everyone the potential to create, train, and launch their own unique agents. Luda is looking to make UGC gameplay a way to make this capability accessible and enjoyable to a wide range of audience.
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
