Ever wondered how long it takes to learn how to play Minecraft? Well, if you're an artificial intelligence program, it takes practice, patience, and watching about 40,000 hours of YouTube videos. And you thought you spent too much time on the Internet.OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research and deployment company, created a video pretraining algorithm that enables neural networks to learn by just watching videos. Previous attempts were unable to get the artificial intelligence to utilize the native human interface within the world-building game. However, this algorithm sees the model interact with the game using the same keypresses and mouse movements as any human player would. This is a huge step forward in artificial intelligence.After consuming hours and hours of videos, the AI was able to learn the basic actions of the game. Almost immediately, the program was chopping trees, making planks, swimming, hunting, and more. With some fine tuning, the model was soon able to craft diamond tools, something that takes even the most adept human player around 20 minutes to do.
Of course, the videos that the program watched were not your average YouTube videos. While anyone can hop on the internet and watch someone build a Minecraft structure or paint a beautiful scene, most of these videos are not informative enough to be sufficient 'how-to' videos. You are not seeing the exact sequence of mouse movements and keypresses.
OpenAI had contractors record and label the basic Minecraft skills. They then crafted another algorithm that interpreted the 70,000 hours of footage into a language the AI could understand: keyboard and mouse input. This way, the AI learned through seeing how humans actually played the game and not through the predictive method most often used in such situations.
While this new algorithm has only been tested using Minecraft, OpenAI believes that the system is adaptable enough to allow for AI to learn general computer use as well.