Artificial intelligence from OpenAI creates diamond picks in Minecraft

By admin On Jun 24, 2022

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OpenAI has published a paper describing the process of training artificial intelligence when playing Minecraft. The AI eventually managed to get to the point in Minecraft that it could craft a diamond pickaxe.

Initially, OpenAI handled roughly 4,500 hours of gameplay by allowing gamers to tag each frame based on which the artificial intelligence could learn basic Minecraft action, explains. OpenAI in a blog post out. For this, the company spent more than 150,000 euros on freelancers who prepared the visual material. The company calls this process Video PreTraining, pre-training AI based on a small dataset of labeled images.

Later, some 70,000 hours of gameplay from all over the internet was used to further tailor the AI, a composite of various neural networks, for playing Minecraft. Labels were no longer used for this; the artificial intelligence, meanwhile, knew how to play and, based on the new data set, learned what it had to do to achieve a goal.

That goal was learning to make a diamond pickaxe, which is a relatively advanced task in Minecraft. This succeeded in about 2.5 percent of all ten-minute Minecraft sessions that the Video PreTraining AI performed. A human Minecraft player succeeds within an average of twenty minutes, although the success rate will be a lot higher.

Playing Minecraft is a very sophisticated task for a neural network because the game is very open and there is a certain amount of randomness baked into the gameplay. The goal of OpenAI is therefore not so much to create an advanced Minecraft bot, but rather to develop a generally applicable artificial intelligence. In the paper the researchers therefore elaborate extensively on training AI based on VPT. The technique would make it possible to prepare an AI with a relatively small data set, which should save a lot of costs in the long term, according to OpenAI.

The artificial intelligence of OpenAI knows how to craft a diamond pickaxe in Minecraft within roughly 4 minutes. Image via OpenAI