Watch Google DeepMind’s new AI agent learn to play video games

Google DeepMind’s caller AI cause learned however to play a clump of video games — including No Man’s Sky, Valheim, and Goat Simulator 3 — to go a viable “interactive gaming companion.”

The caller cause tool, SIMA 2, builds connected its earlier iteration, SIMA (Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent), which DeepMind released successful March 2024. It besides incorporates Google’s Gemini AI for the archetypal time, meaning the cause tin spell beyond simply pursuing instructions to “understand a user’s high-level goal, execute analyzable reasoning successful pursuit, and skillfully execute goal-oriented actions wrong games,” adjacent ones it hasn’t seen before, according to a DeepMind blog post. It’s presently being released to immoderate academics and developers arsenic a constricted probe preview.

Despite SIMA 2’s gaming prowess, creating a consumer-facing gaming helper isn’t the broader extremity here, members of the DeepMind squad told The Verge during a Wednesday briefing. Jane Wang, a elder unit probe idiosyncratic astatine DeepMind, called it “a truly large grooming ground” for perchance transferring the skills to real-world environments 1 day.

And, arsenic usual, it each comes backmost to the ever-intensifying AGI contention betwixt Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. “This is simply a important measurement successful the absorption of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), with important implications for the aboriginal of robotics and AI-embodiment successful general,” DeepMind’s blog station states.

Joe Marino, a probe idiosyncratic astatine DeepMind, doubled down connected that, saying that SIMA 2’s quality to instrumentality actions successful a virtual satellite and grip environments it has ne'er seen earlier is simply a “fundamental” measurement toward AGI — and perchance toward gathering a general-purpose robot down the line.