An artificial intelligence from Google DeepMind can play nine open-world video games like a human, by watching video from a screen and controlling a keyboard and mouse
By Alex Wilkins
13 March 2024
Some of the 3D virtual gaming environments that Google DeepMind’s SIMA AI has been mastering
SIMA Team
A Google DeepMind artificial intelligence model can play different open-world video games, such as No Man’s Sky, like a human just by watching video from a screen, which could be a step towards generally intelligent AIs that operate in the corporeal world.
Playing video games has long been a means of testing the progress of AI systems, such as Google DeepMind’s AI mastery of virtual chess and Go, but these games have obvious ways to win or lose, making it relatively straightforward to train an AI to succeed at them.
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Open-world games with more abstract objectives and extraneous information that can be ignored, such as Minecraft, are harder for AI systems to crack. Because the array of choices available in these games makes them a little more like normal life, they are thought to be an important stepping stone towards training AI agents that could do jobs in the real world – such as controlling robots – and artificial general intelligence.
Now, researchers at Google DeepMind have developed an AI they call a Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent, or SIMA, which can play nine different video games and virtual environments it hasn’t seen before using just the video feed from the game. This included the space-exploring No Man’s Sky, the problem-solving Teardown and the action-packed Goat Simulator 3.