The ChatGPT chatbot was designed to generate digital text, everything from poetry to term papers to computer programs. But when a team of artificial intelligence researchers at Nvidia, the computer chip company, accessed its underlying technology, they realized it could do much more.
Within weeks, they taught him how to play the popular video game Minecraft. Within the digital universe of Minecraft, he learned to swim, gather plants, hunt pigs, mine for gold, and build houses.
“You can go into the world of Minecraft and explore on your own, collect materials, and get better and better at all kinds of skills,” said Linxi Fan, known as Jim, a senior research scientist at Nvidia.
The project was an early sign that the world’s leading AI researchers are ttransforming chatbots into a new type of autonomous system called AI agent. These agents can do more than chat. They can use software applications, websites, and other online tools, including spreadsheets, online calendars, travel sites, and more.. Over time, researchers say, AI agents could become much more sophisticated and could replace office workers, automating almost any administrative job.
“This is a huge, potentially trillion-dollar business opportunity,” said Jeff Clune, a computer science professor at the University of British Columbia who previously worked at OpenAI, the San Francisco startup that built ChatGPT. “This has enormous advantages—and enormous consequences—for society.”
Nvidia agent plays a game. Similar agents can schedule meetings, edit files, analyze data, and create bar charts. The idea is that these automated systems will eventually act as personal assistants capable of performing a wide range of tasks.
GPT-4, the technology behind ChatGPT, is what researchers call a large language model, an AI system that learns by analyzing large amounts of data. In recent months, the system has surprised hundreds of millions of people with the way it generates emails, writes speeches and improvises on almost any topic. But your most important skill may be programming.
You can generate a program that draws a unicorn or drops digital snow on your laptop screen. It can also generate code that accesses other software applications and websites. This is how Nvidia researchers taught GPT-4 to play Minecraft.
Current bots are not skilled enough to perform more than simple tasks. And allowing them to roam freely on the Internet would be a risk. That’s why companies are starting small.
A few months after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, it released a way for the chatbot to do more. After installing several plugins—software that augments what the bot can do—you could ask it to search for flights on travel sites, grab a map of your hometown from Google Earth, or transform a spreadsheet detailing your annual expenses into a graph. . With a plugin called code interpreter, ChatGPT could not only write code, but also execute it. This allowed the bot to edit spreadsheets and transform still images into videos. Other companies are exploring similar technologies.
“These are projects where we essentially imagine AI working with other AIs on your behalf,” said Ashley Llorens, vice president at Microsoft.
In the summer of 2022, Clune was part of a team of OpenAI researchers that created an agent that could use the software much like a person would — mouse click after mouse click, keystroke after keystroke. key. The team fed the system hours of videos of people playing Minecraft. By analyzing the way people used their mouse and keyboard to navigate Minecraft’s digital universe, the system learned how to play the game.
Clune said this type of agent will eventually allow artificial intelligence to use a broader range of applications and websites, giving everyone access to a digital assistant that could potentially do almost anything on the Internet. That could make life easier — but it could also replace jobs.
“If AI can do anything we can do, it doesn’t just replace boring tasks,” he said. “It replaces all tasks.”
By: CADE METZ and KAREN WEISE
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6961343, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-10-30 19:00:06
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