Another day in 2023 means another day when someone has decided to push AI into doing another task. This time instead of getting AI to write their apology letters for them, a team of pretty intelligent people set GPT-4 wild in a game of Minecraft.
Linxi Fan, an AI researcher from Nvidia, teamed up with a few others and devised a way to use the tech in-game. Up to now, GPT-4 has been used as a language model in ChatGPT to generate “realistic” conversation pieces, CVs, University essays and web page blurbs, but Linxi thought it had more potential.
The team created a bot called Voyager, with GPT-4 as its brains. The idea was that GPT-4 would generate goals for the bot, and a bit of extra code would tweak the bot’s skill over time as it performs the tasks needed to achieve the goals. This is generally what machine learning typically entails, performing a task over and over again until the bot has “perfected” it, however with the addition of a “conscious” section to the bot that drives it to achieve more and more complex goals, the Voyage bot has significantly out-performed any other Minecraft bot to date.
Here’s a handy line graph just to show you how much better it’s done.
If anyone out there works with Steve from Minecraft, you might have to tell him to start looking for another job, but for the rest of us, this testing shows that the language model GPT-4, and whatever comes after it, can be used to automate tasks and free up some of our time. We all know that our phones are listening in any way; perhaps it can now suggest booking a table at your favourite restaurant when you are talking to your partner about your upcoming anniversary. Maybe it will hop on to Sixty60 and add Milk to your cart for you when you moan about having black coffee for the 4th time this week.
Is an AI personal assistant you’d be excited for? Or are you worried that that’ll be the beginning of the end for us squishy, blood-filled humans?