How an AI bot plays Minecraft by itself using GPT-4

Researchers have compared Voyager’s capabilities to other Minecraft agents. As per the findings, Voyager can aid in obtaining over three times more items, builds tools 15 times faster and can explore more than twice as far.

A group of researchers have built an AI bot that can play the popular Minecraft game all by itself. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement.

A group of researchers have built an AI bot that can play the popular Minecraft game all by itself. Unlike other Minecraft agents that use reinforced learning techniques, the bot developed by a motley team from Caltech, UT Austin, and NVIDIA, uses GPT-4 language model.

The team has integrated the state-of-the-art AI chatbot into the game to continuous improve on itself without any human intervention. The bot, called Voyager, solves problems inside the game.

The Voyager reads the game’s state through an API and improve on it. For example, if there is a fishing rod and a river nearby, the bot may use GPT-4 to suggest fishing as a goal to gain experience.

Voyager then uses this goal to generate the necessary code for the character to achieve it. The most interesting part is the code that GPT-4 generates to add behaviours to the bot.

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In case the suggested code does not work correctly, Voyager improves using error messages, game feedback, and a description of the code generated by GPT-4.

Over a period of time, the bot creates a library of code to learn and accomplish complex tasks and explore the game further.

Researchers have compared Voyager’s capabilities to other Minecraft agents. As per the findings, Voyager can aid in obtaining over three times more items, builds tools 15 times faster and can explore more than twice as far.

The successful results displayed by Voyager not only demonstrates the potential of using ChatGPT to perform useful actions on computers, but also widens the scope of what’s possible using AI in the broader sense.

Separately, Microsoft, the company that owns Minecraft and also the firm backing OpenAI, is training AI programmes to play the game. The software maker recently announced its Windows 11 Copilot, which is an operating system feature that can use machine learning and APIs to automate certain tasks.