Facebook is training an AI assistant inside 'Minecraft'

This time around, however, the game of choice is Minecraft. In Minecraft's'Creative' mode, players have been able to recreate complex structures like Star Trek's Enterprise D with just a few simple building blocks. It's that potential for almost infinite creativity with a small set of easy-to-understand tools, in conjunction with the difficulty of teaching an AI to understand natural language, that has Facebook spending countless hours on a private Minecraft server. The hope is to eventually create an AI assistant that can help people with their day-to-day tasks, which is something Facebook has been trying to do for a couple of years now. In 2015, Facebook launched M, an AI-powered personal assistant within the company's Messenger app, only to shut down the platform after two-and-a-half years.