OpenAI’s New AI Learned to Play Minecraft

In 2020, OpenAI’s machine learning algorithm GPT-3 blew people away when, after ingesting billions of words scraped from the internet, it began spitting out well-crafted sentences. This year, DALL-E 2, a cousin of GPT-3 trained on text and images, caused a similar stir online when it began whipping up surreal images of astronauts riding horses and, more recently, crafting weird, photorealistic faces of people that don’t exist.

Now, the company says its latest AI has learned to play Minecraft after watching some 70,000 hours of video showing people playing the game on YouTube.

School of Mines

Compared to numerous prior Minecraft algorithms which operate in much simpler “sandbox” versions of the game, the new AI plays in the same environment as humans, using standard keyboard-and-mouse commands.

In a blog post and preprint detailing the work, the OpenAI team say that, out of the box, the algorithm learned basic skills, like chopping down trees, making planks, and building crafting tables. They also observed it swimming, hunting, cooking, and “pillar jumping.”

“To the best of our knowledge, there is no published work that operates in the full, unmodified human action space, which includes drag-and-drop inventory management and item crafting,” the authors wrote in their paper.

With fine-tuning—that is, training the model on a more focused data set—they found the algorithm more reliably performed all of these tasks, but also began to advance its technological prowess by fabricating wooden and stone tools and building basic shelters, exploring villages, and raiding chests.

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