OpenAI trained a bot to play Minecraft after feeding it 70,000 hours of YouTube gameplay | Digit

Back in the day, if you could defeat the computer at chess, you’d feel like a king for a day. Now, we’ve got a modern equivalent of ‘beating the computer’ and that is possibly playing with AI. OpenAI, artificial intelligence research, and deployment company has announced that it’s trained a bot to play Minecraft. How did it achieve this? Well, the same way we all learn things – by watching 70,000 hours of Youtube videos. 

The bot is the first to create the highly coveted DIamond tools in the game. This isn’t just significant from a gaming perspective but is also an important breakthrough in the kind of tools that can be used to train AI.

Breaththroughs in training AI

According to research, this represents a major breakthrough in imitation learning. Imitation learning is a method of teaching AI how to do things by showing the bots how humans do the task. You know, monkey see, monkey do. AI learns by mimicking the tasks it sees, which means we may soon be able to train AI bots to take over a bunch of menial tasks. 

Researchers at OpenAI hope to use this to teach bots to achieve something similar to GPT-3 for large-scale language models. GPT-3 can imitate human-written text. It had been trained using thousands of texts and books to achieve the same. 

“In the last few years we’ve seen the rise of this GPT-3 paradigm where we see amazing capabilities come from big models trained on enormous swathes of the internet,” says Bowen Baker at OpenAI, in an interview with Technology Review.

Thinking about playing Minecraft? It’s actually one of the most played games in the world right now, and you can’t go wrong with it at all. 

About Me: Kajoli is a tech-enthusiast with a soft-spot for smart kitchen and home appliances. She loves exploring gadgets and gizmos that are designed to make life simpler, but also secretly fears a world run by AI. Oh wait, we’re already there.
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