They plugged GPT-4 into Minecraft—and unearthed new potential for AI

Will Knight writing at Ars Technica (Apple News)

The Nvidia team, which included Anima Anandkumar, the company’s director of machine learning and a professor at Caltech, created a Minecraft bot called Voyager that uses GPT-4 to solve problems inside the game. The language model generates objectives that help the agent explore the game, and code that improves the bot’s skill at the game over time.

Voyager doesn’t play the game like a person, but it can read the state of the game directly, via an API. It might see a fishing rod in its inventory and a river nearby, for instance, and use GPT-4 to suggest the goal of doing some fishing to gain experience. It will then use this goal to have GPT-4 generate the code needed to have the character achieve it.