OpenAI has cracked a multi-application artificial intelligence capable of playing Minecraft after watching YouTube videos.
Having fed on more than 70,000 hours of content, the new technology thus developed opens the way to a training method for machines to perform complex tasks involving thousands of different actions.
M-AInecraft
Since its release in 2011, Minecraft has become a truly global phenomenon that has launched the careers of many content creators on YouTube. Seeing a great opportunity to develop a method of training machines by imitation, OpenAI used this almost inexhaustible source of data to develop a new artificial intelligence.
Until now, learning by imitation via videos has been relatively limited. He demanded that each action be precisely detailed, which drastically reduced the amount of exploitable content. OpenAI has thus developed a new approach called “Video Pre-Training” (VPT).
The idea is to develop another neural network responsible for automatically detailing the actions that take place in a video. The team started by inviting players from Minecraft record their sessions as well as keyboard and mouse actions. 2,000 hours thus constituted the first stone of the building before the artificial intelligence could learn by imitation more than 70,000 hours of play on YouTube.
Imitation learning has been behind the greatest advances in AI development in recent years. But this was limited to tasks with a specific purpose. On his side, Minecraft is by definition a game that offers great freedom.
Minecraft : AI’s new best friend?
The phenomenon of Mojang Studios has therefore not only attracted many players, but also aroused the curiosity of researchers in artificial intelligence. At the last NeurIPS conference, one of the most important in the field, an environment specially dedicated to the development of AI called “MineDojo” won an award, for example.
Thanks to its new learning technique, OpenAI has seen its artificial intelligence perform tasks involving up to more than 20,000 consecutive actions. A real revolution, according to the team. Beyond Minecraftthe VPT approach could find many other applications, such as allowing an AI to use a keyboard and mouse, to browse the Internet or to place orders online, among others.
Like many other researches still in development, a concrete application is however not about to see the light of day, according to certain specialists. Reproducing actions in a video game by simply pressing keys presents a whole different challenge in real life, where the same tasks are much more complex to perform.
Still, the successful use of a wealth of information as rich as YouTube offers a considerable advance for the development of artificial intelligence as a whole. After all, you can’t stop progress.
Source : Technology Review
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