Ethan Mollick publishes Portals, a browser-based 3D experience of 471 generated worlds built by agent teams
Ethan Mollick, a professor at Wharton, has made public a project called Portals: an endless, hands-off flight through 471 machine-generated 3D worlds, running in the browser with no server. According to the project description, AI agents designed and wrote the whole thing, with a lead agent coordinating the teams; the figure of "about 25,000 agents" is Claude's estimate, not a measured number. The code carries a non-commercial licence, and the authors note that the licence of some borrowed shader snippets differs from the one stated.
Who is affected and how
- senior developer
- Look at the repo's structure (engine, building blocks, world files): it is a good example of how a large job can be split among many agents.
- tech lead
- The project shows that an agent team can build a large codebase, but licence checking remains a human task: borrowed code can slip in with the wrong label.
- DevOps, security
- When code is machine-written, build licence and provenance checks into the pipeline; here the authors themselves found borrowed snippets under a different licence.
- startup founder
- It cannot be carried into a commercial product: the licence (CC BY-NC-SA) permits only non-commercial use.
Sources
- emollick/ai-portals — An endless, hands-off flight through 471 generated 3D worlds in a browsergithub.com · Nov 9, 2026
Machine-generated summary based on the titles and excerpts of the source articles. The facts come from the linked article.