A team of researchers created voyageran artificial intelligence agent powered by the technology of GPT-4. They designed it with one objective: to play Minecraft, the famous exploration and construction video game. And it turned out to be very good. According to the study, the AI proved to have “exceptional competence”.
The research involved scientists from Caltech, Stanford, the University of Texas and NVIDIA. Other AI agents that have been tested in Minecraft They used classical reinforcement learning techniques. Voyager, on the other hand, relies on code generation to improve itself in Minecraft via GPT-4.
Voyager consists of a «automatic curriculum » to boost exploration in the world of pixels. In addition, the study report explains, it takes advantage of a “skills library” of executable code constantly growing database for storing and retrieving complex behaviors. The AI agent also uses a new iterative request mechanism capable of correcting itself,
Minecraft It is an open world game. There are no predetermined goals, levels, or fixed storylines. Open exploration demands a series of skills and learning from the players. In this sense, Voyager’s AI demonstrated clear autonomy and rapid evolution without the need for human intervention, the research says.
The team compared Voyager to other agents based on other language models than GPT-4 that also played Minecraft. The experiment showed that he was able to find triple the items, travel twice as far, and unlock milestones 15 times faster.
How did GPT-4 help Voyager’s AI in Minecraft?
Play Minecraft Demands some motivation to explore and search for new tasks. So the researchers decided to give Voyager the “curriculum” or “automatic curriculum” generated by GPT-4. With him, he was given only one big goal: “Discover as many different things as possible.”
As Voyager learned new things in Minecraft, its developers stored these capabilities in the “skill library”, also thanks to a program generated by GPT-4. “Voyager-developed abilities are temporally extended, interpretable, and compositional, increasing agent abilities rapidly and alleviating catastrophic forgetfulness,” the researchers explained.
That Voyager could navigate longer distances and traverse a wide variety of terrain was a key element in his learning. ReAct, Reflection and AutoGPTother AI agents tested, often found themselves confined to local areas.
Voyager was the only one that was able to unlock the diamond level of the tech tree (Tech Tree). The agent successfully learned new tasks such as successfully crafting diamond pickaxes, golden swords, lava buckets, and compasses. All this, without training or previous knowledge.
The researchers noted that the GPT-4 experiment in Minecraft it serves as a starting point for developing powerful AI agents. “Generally capable autonomous agents are the next frontier of artificial intelligence. They continually explore, plan and develop new skills in open worlds, driven by survival and curiosity,” explained Jim Fan, one of the study participants, on Twitter. Minecraftis the best test bed with infinite possibilities for this type of agents, he said.