Minecrafts AI For CodeWriting Points To The Future Of Computers
Microsoft just showed how artificial intelligence could make its way into many software applications by writing code on the in the air.
At the Microsoft Build developer conference today the chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, demonstrated an AI helper for the game Minecraft. The game's non-player character is powered by the same machine learning technology Microsoft has been testing to create software code. Just another wordpress site at how recent advances in AI could revolutionize personal computing in years to come by replacing interfaces that you type, tap and click to navigate into interfaces that you can simply talk with.
The Minecraft agent responds to commands entered by typing them into code that runs behind the scenes, using the API that is used by the software game. Just another wordpress site that controls the bot was developed using huge amounts of text and code in natural languages, then shown the API specifications for Minecraft, along with some usage examples. When a user asks the bot to "come here," for instance, the AI model that is running behind it will create the code to make the agent move towards the player. The bot was able to perform more complicated tasks in the Build demo, such as retrieving items and combining them to create new items. The model was taught using natural language and code which means it can answer basic questions about how to build things.
Although it's not certain how reliable the system will function outside of the demonstration, similar tricks could still be employed to make different applications respond when spoken or written commands are made available.
Microsoft has developed GitHub Copilot, an AI software for coding based on the same technology. It will automatically suggest code when a developer begins typing, or when responding to the comments added to a piece of code. Scott says Copilot is the first of many "AI-first products" from Microsoft and other companies in the future. Scott says that AI-based code writing "allows you to think differently about software development so that you can communicate your vision for what you would like to accomplish."
Scott doesn't provide specific examples but it could be a version Windows that finds a document and emails it to a coworker when asked. Also, an AI-infused Excel version that converts data into charts when you need to. Scott says there will be many productivity gains for everyday cognitive tasks that nobody enjoys.
AI is able to accomplish tasks like translating text, transcribing audio and classifying images. New AI programs are capable of creating coherent text-such like computer code due to recent advances in algorithmic technology and massive amounts of computer power.
The Minecraft bot was developed using an AI model known as Codex that was developed by OpenAI, an AI company which received funding from Microsoft in 2019. Codex was trained using natural language texts gathered from the internet and billions of lines of code from GitHub, a popular repository for software owned by Microsoft.
Microsoft's Copilot was made available to a limited number of testers in June 2021 and is currently being utilized by more than 10,000 developers who have created on average around 35 percent of their code in popular languages such as Python and Java using Copilot, Microsoft says. The company plans to make Copilot free for everyone to download this summer. To create a similar bot to the Minecraft bot, developers would have to work with the underlying AI model, Codex.
Both Codex and Copilot have created a bit of anxiety among developers, who fear they could be eliminated from a job. The Minecraft demo could inspire similar concerns. However, Scott says that the feedback received from Copilot has been mostly positive which suggests that it helps with more complicated programming tasks. "If you talk to a developer who actually utilizes Copilot and they'll tell you that this is a fantastic tool that it's amazing,'" he says.
