How 'A.I. Agents' That Roam the Internet Could One Day Replace Workers

The widely used chatbot ChatGPT was designed to generate digital text, everything from poetry to term papers to computer programs. But when a team of artificial intelligence researchers at the computer chip company Nvidia got their hands on the chatbot's underlying technology, they realized it could do a lot more. Within weeks, they taught it to play Minecraft, one of the world's most popular video games. Inside Minecraft's digital universe, it learned to swim, gather plants, hunt pigs, mine gold and build houses. "It can go into the Minecraft world and explore by itself and collect materials by itself and get better and better at all kinds of skills," said a Nvidia senior research scientist, Linxi Fan, who is known as Jim.