A bot that watched 70,000 hours of Minecraft could unlock AI's next big thing

The result is a breakthrough for a technique known as imitation learning, in which neural networks are trained how to perform tasks by watching humans do them. Imitation learning can be used to train AI to control robot arms, drive cars or navigate webpages. There is a vast amount of video online showing people doing different tasks. By tapping into this resource, the researchers hope to do for imitation learning what GPT-3 did for large language models. "In the last few years we've seen the rise of this GPT-3 paradigm where we see amazing capabilities come from big models trained on enormous swathes of the internet," says Bowen Baker at OpenAI, one of the team behind the new Minecraft bot.