Open Souls is an open-source framework and philosophy for building persistent AI characters with memory, personality, emotions, and agency, co-founded by Kevin Fischer and Jerrell Taylor. The project was later renamed Illusion of Life, after which Fischer announced that active operations were being wound down. Open Souls's Twitter Score is 16 out of 1000 as of September 2026, ranking #61,992 among 487,142 tracked accounts.
Open Souls was built around the idea that conversational AI characters should think and behave with genuine personality, feelings, memory, and agency, offering developers an open-source toolkit to construct such experiences. The hosted Soul Engine cloud service is no longer operating, though the underlying framework and packages remain publicly available as open-source software.
Open Souls participated in Betaworks Ventures' 2023 AI Camp: Augment cohort and also took part in the Andreessen Horowitz Games SPEEDRUN 002 program, with a16z appearing on its official investment list. Additional backers previously included Greycroft, Differential Ventures, and Mozilla Ventures. Open Souls has published 404 posts and has been mentioned by 1 accounts a total of 1 times.
Who follows Open Souls on X?
Open Souls attracts a technically engaged audience. The accounts that follow Open Souls include 59 founders, 27 angel investors, 13 influencers and 2 VCs, among them Marc Andreessen, Tarun Chitra, Andrew Chen, Dylan Field, Andrew Steinwold and Aaron Wright.