OpenAI is a company focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning advances that benefit humanity. Recently, the firm announced that it has successfully trained a bot to play Minecraft using over 70,000 hours of gameplay videos. Success marks more than just a bot playing a game, it marks a big step forward in observation and imitation-based machine learning.
Significant advance for artificial intelligence education
The bot developed by OpenAI is a near-perfect example of imitated learning or supervised learning. Unlike learning reinforcements, which promise rewards when the goal is achieved, imitated learning is accomplished by watching people perform specific tasks. These two learning tactics apply to us humans as well. In this case, OpenAI leveraged existing gameplay videos and tutorials to teach its bots complex in-game moves that would require around 24,000 individual actions for a typical player to accomplish.
OpenAI, on the other hand, used a proprietary approach known as Video Pre-Training (VPT) to increase the number of tagged videos available, instead of dealing with the manual data tagging processes mentioned above. Initially, the system was trained with 2000 hours of explanatory Minecraft gameplay. The data from this process was then used to tag 70,000 hours of previously untagged Minecraft content. So this process gave the Minecraft bot a much larger dataset to analyze and emulate.