Minecraft's Code-Writing AI's Points To The Future Of Computers
Microsoft just showed how artificial intelligence could find its way into numerous software applications by writing code on the fly.
At the Microsoft Build developer conference today, the company's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, demonstrated an AI aid for the game Minecraft. The non-player character within the game is powered by the same machine-learning technology Microsoft has been testing for auto-generating software code. The achievement hints at how recent advances in AI could revolutionize personal computing in years to come, replacing interfaces that you type, tap and click to navigate into interfaces that you can simply talk with.
The Minecraft agent responds appropriately to typed commands by converting them into working code behind the scenes by using the API that is used by the software game. My Games that runs the bot was trained on vast amounts of code and natural language text and then presented with the API specifications for Minecraft as well as a few usage examples. The AI model that runs the base will automatically generate the code required to move the agent towards the player whenever a player says "come here." In the demo shown at Build the event, the bot was also able accomplish more complicated tasks, such as locating items and combining them to create something new. The model was trained using both natural language and code, so it can answer simple questions regarding how to construct things.
Although it's not known how well the system could function outside the demo similar techniques could be employed to make different applications respond to typed or spoken commands.
Microsoft has developed an AI coding tool called GitHub Copilot on top of the same technology. It will suggest code automatically when a programmer begins writing or responds to comments to a piece. Scott states that Copilot is the first of many "AI-first products" from Microsoft and other companies to come in the near future. Scott says that AI-based code writing "allows you to think in a different way about software development so that you can clearly define your goals for something you wish to accomplish."
Scott doesn't give specific examples but it could be a version Windows that finds a document and then emails it to a colleague upon request. Also, an AI-infused Excel version that transforms data into charts when you are asked. "We're going to witness many big productivity gains for all kinds of routine cognitive work that none of us especially likes," Scott says.
In recent years, AI has proven adept at tasks such as classifying images, transcribing audio and even translating text. New AI programs are capable of creating coherent text-such like computer code, thanks to recent advances in algorithmic technology and huge amounts of computing power.
The Minecraft bot was created using an AI model known as Codex that was developed by OpenAI the AI company which received funding from Microsoft in the year 2019. Codex was trained by using natural language texts from the internet and billions of lines from GitHub the most popular software repository that is owned by Microsoft.
Microsoft's Copilot was made available to a small number of users in June 2021. It is currently being used by more than 10,000 developers who have created an average of 35 percent of their code in popular languages like Python and Java using Copilot, Microsoft says. Microsoft plans to make Copilot available for anyone to download this summer. To create something similar to the Minecraft bot, developers would require the base AI model, Codex.
Developers are anxious about Codex and Copilot because they are concerned that their jobs could be automated. The Minecraft demo has sparked similar fears. But Scott says the feedback for Copilot has been largely positive which suggests that it helps with more complicated code tasks. "If you talk to a developer who uses Copilot they'll tell you 'this is a fantastic tool that it's amazing,'" he says.