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.

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.

The agents are supposed to function as high-fidelity digital twins, faithfully replicating a person’s manner, speech, interests, and so on. 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 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.’ The project remains a bare-bones proof-of-concept, but 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.

Among the few hundred people who have played around with the Pixel Societies prototype, the most common request is for agents to recommend real-life romantic partners on the basis of virtual chemistry. The developers see agentic dating as a central feature of the social platform they are creating. Algorithm-based dating apps ‘create a market with dramatic levels of inequality, where the rich get richer—where “rich” in this case means “hot,”’ as Paul Eastwick, a professor of psychology at UC Davis and author of Bonded By Evolution, puts it.