At Minus AI Research, we build learning systems that behave like life. We began with memory and collective presence at the scale of human experience, and that work led us to a deeper question: can we model the dynamics of life itself? Our early worlds and our current cell research probe the same four behaviors, at different scales: how a system holds state, how it interacts, how it adapts, and how it persists.

At Minus AI Research, we build learning systems that behave like life. We began with memory and collective presence at the scale of human experience, and that work led us to a deeper question: can we model the dynamics of life itself? Our early worlds and our current cell research probe the same four behaviors, at different scales: how a system holds state, how it interacts, how it adapts, and how it persists.

SCALE 01HumanSCALE 02WorldSCALE 03AgentSCALE 04Cell

The scale changes. The question remains.

01

State

What does a system carry forward from what came before?

02

Interaction

How does behavior change when a system meets an environment, or another actor?

03

Adaptation

How does experience change what a system does next?

04

Persistence

How does coherent behavior survive while the system itself keeps changing?

Now

Cell Intelligence.

Cell Intelligence.

A simulated cell that feeds, divides, and responds, trained the way our installations and our agents were trained, and a platform that will be its infrastructure, open to the people who want to build on it.

The first question: can we steer what a cell becomes?

The first question: can we steer what a cell becomes?

Why the shift

From representing life to modeling it.

From representing life to modeling it.

Then · Human scale

Memory, identity and collective presence.

Our early works placed people inside evolving artificial worlds. A memory shared, an image offered, or a gesture made changed what happened next. With thousands of visitors, these works are where imitation and reinforcement were first proven at scale.

Now · Cellular scale

State, response and change in living systems.

The questions remain, but the scale changes. At the cellular level, persistence and adaptation are not metaphors for life. They are part of life itself. A simulated cell lets us ask them directly: what it carries forward, how it responds, and what it becomes.

Publications

ACM SIGGRAPH 2026 · Proc. ACM Comput. Graph. Interact. Tech. 9(3) · Weidi Zhang, Lijiaozi Cheng, Yi Wang, Jieliang Luo

IEEE VIS Arts Program (VISAP) 2025 · Weidi Zhang, Lijiaozi Cheng, Paul Taro Schmidt, Jieliang Luo

ACM SIGGRAPH 2024 · Proc. ACM Comput. Graph. Interact. Tech. 7(4) · Weidi Zhang, Lijiaozi Cheng, Jieliang Luo

Join us

Help us build models of life.

Help us build models of life.

We are looking for researchers, data partners, artists, and institutions.