Notes

Minecraft's Code-Writing AI Points To The Future Of Computers

Microsoft recently demonstrated how artificial intelligence could make its way into numerous software applications by writing code on the fly.



At the Microsoft Build developer conference today the chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, demonstrated an AI helper for the game Minecraft. The non-player character of the game is powered by the same machine learning technology Microsoft has been testing for auto-generating software code. This feat shows how AI advances could revolutionize personal computing in the next few years, replacing interfaces you tap or type to access interfaces you can talk to.



The Minecraft agent responds appropriately to typed commands by converting them into working code behind the scenes using the software API for the game. The AI model that controls the bot was developed using large amounts of code and natural language text, then shown the API specifications for Minecraft as well as some examples of how to use it. The AI model used to create the model will automatically create the code to direct the agent towards the player when a player says "come here." The bot was able to accomplish more complicated tasks during the Build demonstration, for instance, retrieving items and combining them into new items. Because the model was trained on natural language as well as code, it was able to respond to simple questions about how to create things.



While it's unclear how reliably the system could function in other situations, similar tricks could be employed to make different applications respond to spoken or typed commands.



Microsoft has built an AI coding tool known as GitHub Copilot on top of the same technology. It automatically suggests code when a programmer begins writing or responds to comments to an article. Scott states that Copilot is the first of many "AI-first products" from Microsoft and other companies to come in the near future. Code-writing AI "lets you think about doing software development in a different way-so you can express an intention to accomplish something you'd like to achieve," he says.



Scott does not give specific examples, but it could be the case in the future. For instance, the creation of a version of Windows that locates a particular document and then emails it to a colleague when you ask for it or an AI-infused version of Excel that turns a dataset into charts when you request. Scott says there will be many productivity gains for everyday cognitive tasks that no one enjoys.



In recent years, AI has proven adept at tasks such as classifying images, transcribing audio and even translating text. New AI programs can produce coherent text, similar to computer code thanks to recent advances in algorithmic technology and massive amounts of computing power.



The Minecraft bot was created using an AI model called Codex which was created by OpenAI the AI company that was funded by Microsoft in 2019. Codex was trained with natural language text from the internet and billions of lines from GitHub, a popular software repository owned by Microsoft.



Microsoft's Copilot was made available to a restricted number of testers in June 2021 and is now being utilized by more than 10,000 developers who have created, on average, around 35 percent of their code in popular languages like Python and Java using Copilot, Microsoft says. Pharaoh's Blog to make Copilot accessible to everyone to download this summer. To build something like the Minecraft bot, developers will have to work with the base AI model, Codex.



Both Codex and Copilot have created a bit of fear among developers, who fear they could be removed from their jobs. The Minecraft demo could inspire similar concerns. But Scott says the feedback for Copilot has been mostly positive and suggests that it simplifies more complex programming tasks. He says that if you talk to anyone who is a Copilot user they will say, "This is such a great tool."


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