OpenAI’s Artificial Intelligence Makes Diamond Pickaxe in Minecraft

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

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

Later, some 70,000 hours of gameplay from across the internet was used to further fine-tune the AI, a composite of disparate 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 dataset, 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 10-minute Minecraft sessions that the Video PreTraining AI performed. A human Minecraft player can do this within an average of twenty minutes, although the success rate will be a lot higher.

Playing Minecraft is a very advanced 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 according to OpenAI should save a lot of costs in the long term.

OpenAI’s artificial intelligence knows how to craft a diamond pickaxe in Minecraft in roughly 4 minutes. Image via OpenAI

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