Facebook Is Building An AI Assistant Inside 'Minecraft'

Facebook Research and MIT researchers are using the popular video game'Minecraft' to build a new AI assistant that can juggle multiple tasks at once. Facebook is using the popular video game Minecraft to help train a new artificially intelligent assistant that, in the future, could help humans perform a wide range of tasks with a broad range of spoken commands. Facebook Research and MIT researchers quietly published a paper in July outlining how they intend to use Minecraft to train an AI assistant that can multitask rather than perform one task at superhuman levels. "In this work, we have argued for building a virtual assistant situated in the game of Minecraft, in order to study learning from interaction, and especially learning from language interaction," the researchers explain in the published paper. According to the researcher team, Minecraft is the perfect environment to train artificial intelligence because it's what is known as a "sandbox" game, which allows players to roam freely, fight, craft, explore and build objects in an online world.