Opponent is a new company founded by Ian Cheng. We are building animal-level AI agents who make a million mistakes, but are capable of assimilating knowledge in real-time and taking feedback seriously.

We are guided by our mission to exercise the spirit of adventure in kids (and their parents) as they navigate the dramatic decade to come.

Our first offering is Dragon Time – daily encounters with an agentic dragon who dispatches calibrated IRL challenges to kids via FaceTime.

To achieve this, we are advancing a knowledge architecture for graduating memories into cognitive maps, a perception faculty inspired by efficiencies found in animal cognition, and a steering system that devises new roles and goals for itself.

We are a small team, obsessed with integrating engineering and the arts for the next generation. If you are interested in neurosymbolic systems, continuous learning, visual/spatial intelligence, applied toward character-driven interfaces, please get in touch: ian@opponent.systems