Google’s DeepMind has developed a gamer AI. Not to be confused with an AI, for gamers, but an AI that IS a gamer.
SIMA is being trained to independently play a variety of video games by following natural-language instructions. Think an AI gaming team mate that can take your instructions and autonomously interact with a 3d gaming world.
While this may sound like a frivolous application that will lead to an endless stream of Twitch bots, SIMA’s real aim is more practical–robots. In effect, going beyond LLM’s, to create the future workforce.
The ability to take task instructions as natural language and repeatedly carry out the tasks independently opens up a consumer robotics market. The range of specialized robots is massive; home health, personal aids, factories and the more controversial military and security application.
The intersection of learning and game theory is fascinating. Reinforcement the concept of gamifying the workplace to increase efficiency. By applying the same mechanics to train a SIMA can lead to redesigns in factory design to maximize automation.
While GPT’s are very good at taking single task requests, they haven’t come close to fulfilling our AI personal assistant dreams. By being able to grow and learn to function independently we can finally fulfil the creation of specialized intelligences. In essence being able to “set it and forget it.”
The current state of both software and robotics is far from independent. Both require explicit programming from a human to perform whatever function it has. Then constant interaction with the user. Obviously, this is just how we work with any tool, either mechanical or digital.
This then changes our fundamental concepts of how we work. In reality, we are witnessing a shift from humans being mere task executors to becoming a diverse group of intelligence managers.
The big obvious risk is human workforce displacement. The advancement of AI autonomy creates the conditions for the fastest massive layoff our world has ever seen. This could lead to a bleak future and collapse of a consumer based economy, or a pseudo socialism. This necessitates a very thoughtful interplay between government policy and industry.
Either way, the development of Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agents (SIMA) reminds us that the introduction of GPT’s are only the first building block to our AI fueled future.
-jm