Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers with Dr. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér.
Today we are going to see what happens if we unleash an AI to watch Minecraft videos
and then, ask this AI to play it. And the big question is,
can it play as well as we, humans do? Well, you’ll get your answer today!
This is OpenAI’s project, which is not to be confused with NVIDIA’s similar project called
MineDojo. So, what was that? That was an AI project that watched a ton
of Youtube tutorial videos on Minecraft. Minecraft is an open world sandbox game,
one of the most played games in the world, and this is a true sandbox, which means that you
can do whatever you wish. You create the story of this game. Gather raw materials, build something,
explore, or don’t, it’s all up to you. This is a sandbox game, and your story after all. So,
what could NVIDIA’s AI do after watching these tutorial videos? Well, a great deal.
For instance, we could even use natural language and ask it to explore an ocean
monument. I really liked this one because the word “explore” is sufficiently vague
and open ended. A human understands what exploring means, but does the AI understand it too?
Well, as you see, it does! Amazing. It could also encircle these llamas with a fence.
Or, it could also be dropped into an arena with an Ender Dragon,
the final boss of the game, if you will. However,
look, this is a very limited setting for this task as the dragon is not charging at the AI.
But at the very least, NVIDIA’s AI understood what fighting meant in this game.
Now, I said the following, quoting: “Starting this game from scratch and building up everything
to defeat such a dragon takes a long time horizon, and will be an excellent benchmark
for the next AI one more paper down the line. I’d love to see it perform this start to end.
Make sure to subscribe, if such a paper appears, I’ll be here to show it to you.”
And I thought, maybe a year or two later there will be some activity here. And now, hold on
to your papers, because OpenAI’s scientists are here with their own spin of this project,
not one year later, but just one week later. Wow! And, with this paper,
I also got what I was looking for, which is an AI that understands longer time horizons.
They make a huge claim. They say that this is the first AI that is capable of crafting Diamond
tools. That is very ambitious. Can that really be? Well, I say that I will believe it when I see
it. Do you see this long sequence of subtasks? We need to do all this correctly and in order
to be able to perform that. This takes up to 24000 actions and 20 minutes even for a human player.
So, let’s see if the AI is also up for the task! It starts chopping wood right away, then, the
planks are coming along. Later, it starts mining, finds iron ore, crafts a furnace, starts smelting,
and at this point I am starting to think that it might make it. That would be absolutely amazing.
However, we still need some diamonds. Can it find some diamonds? It takes a while,
and…oh my, got ‘em! And from then on, we have established that this is a smart AI, so from
here on out, this is a piece of cake. There we go. I can’t believe it. A diamond pickaxe.
And here is my other favorite, it can also perform pillar jumps. This is a cool technique where we
jump, and while mid-air, we quickly put a block below us, and tadaa. We are now standing a little
higher. If we do this over and over again, we will be able to reach places that otherwise would be
way out of reach. And the AI learned this too. How cool is that?
While we are looking at what else it is capable of, I would like to bring up one more remarkable
thing here. Here goes: it learns from unlabeled videos. In other words, this means that the AI is
not told what these videos are about, it is just allowed to watch them and find out for itself.
And to be able to learn this much information from this kind of unlabeled data just is an
incredible sign for future projects to come. You see, playing Minecraft well is great,
but this is an AI that can learn new things from unstructured data. In the future,
these agents will be able to perform more general, non-gaming related tasks. What a time to be alive!
For instance, the amazing DeepMind lab is already walking this path. First they wrote an AI
that could learn to play Chess, Go, and Starcraft 2, and then, they used a similar system to solve
protein folding. Now, make no mistake, the protein folding system is not exactly the
same system as the chess AI, but they share a few building blocks.
And here, having two amazing Minecraft AIs appear within a week of each other is a true
testament to how quickly projects are coming along in AI research.
So, let’s apply the first Law of Papers - what do you think this will be capable
of one more paper down the line? Let me know in the comments below!
Thanks for watching and for your generous support, and I'll see you next time!