A lot of open-world video games require the player to perform menial tasks in order to gain important resources. Players may use AI to skip those activities soon as an AI bot steps into games like Minecraft and do it for them.
GPT-4 in Minecraft
The OpenAI language model has been developed to be able to function as a bot inside the block game Minecraft. It explores the game and determines which tasks need to be done, which then prompts it to generate a code that helps the character achieve them.
NVIDIA AI researcher Linxi "Jim" Fan along with the director of machine learning Anima Anandkumar created Voyager, a Minecraft bot. GPT-4 interacts with the game through an API and reads the state of the game, as reported by Ars Technica.
Although, it doesn't really function as a player like an actual person would. For instance, it can check the inventory and use the language model to suggest what the player needs to do to gain experience. It also generates the code that will help the player achieve the objective.
What's more impressive is that GPT-4 allows the bot to improve its skills within the game as it "learns" about it over time. Voyager will learn to function better by reading error messages, feedback from the game itself, as well as a description of the code from the language model.
It will pick up more and more skills to help the player achieve increasingly complex goals. It also progresses faster than average AI agents. For example, it can explore twice as far and build tools 15 times faster, which further proves the power of the language model, GPT-4.
AI researcher Fan says that the approach can even be improved to include visual information on the factors it can consider. Even the owner of Minecraft, which is Microsoft, has been training other AI programs to play the game.
Not only are games useful grounds for training AI, but they can also integrate AI technology to make video games more interactive and immersive, which is already being developed. NVIDIA has created a feature that lets NPC interactions become conversational.
Read Also: Human Player Beats AI Opponent at a Game of Go
Conversations with NPCs
NVIDIA has been riding the AI trends, and they are doing a marvelous job at it both business-wise and innovation. The chipmaker giant created the AI model foundry service called Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) which lets NPCs have their own backstories.
This means that the non-playable characters will now have more depth when it comes to conversations, which are usually limited in terms of dialogue, as they can only say what the developers programmed them to say.
NVIDIA released a demonstration called "Kairos" wherein a player interacts with an NPC in a ramen shop. When the player asks how the character called Jin was, he responds by saying that he's not so good and will elaborate more when the player asks more questions.
Players can interact with the NPCs just by speaking through their headsets, which is made possible by the text-to-speech tool used by NVIDIA NeMO called Riva. The NPC's facial expression will also match the dialogue using NVIDIA's Omniverse Audio2Face.
Related: NVIDIA Introduces Feature That Lets NPCs Have Conversations with Players
