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

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

The technology that underpins ChatGPT has the potential to do much more than just talk. Linxi “Jim” Fan, an AI researcher at the chipmaker Nvidia, worked with some colleagues to devise a way to set the powerful language model GPT-4—the “brains” behind ChatGPT and a growing number of other apps and services—loose inside the blocky video game Minecraft.

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.