For years there have been researchers finding ways to have AI models play video games as a way to prepare them for tasks in everyday life. With DeepMind, which is the AI arm owned by Google, they have released an AI agent called SIMA to navigate a variety of virtual environments.
Photo Credit: Microsoft Copilot
Why AI in Gaming Matters
AI technology enhances gameplay with personalized experiences, realistic graphics, and intelligent non-playable characters (NPCs). The experiences are exclusive to different games as developers look to deliver console-like gaming experiences across different device types.
Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent (SIMA)
SIMA, which stands for Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent, can follow natural language directions to perform a variety of tasks within virtual environments. This capability is not limited to linear games following a specific story, and will be available to open world settings.
The agent learned how to mine for resources, fly a spaceship, and build sculptures from building blocks — all of which were performed using a keyboard and a mouse controlling the game’s central character.
The agent is powered by an AI system that is designed to map language to images and to do so precisely. A video model was trained to predict what happens next when the agent makes a specific action and then have the system fine tune it into game-specific 3D data.
Although SIMA seems to be the one AI agent looking promising with actions and performance, there is still more for improvement with its engineers having confirmed the intentionality of the behavior of the agent when it fails. SIMA was tested on the game No Man’s Sky, an action-adventure survival game developed and published by Hello Games, and it performed at about 60% of human capacity.
It is still a work in progress on understanding how they work, and with SIMA alongside the new sets of agents that may come from other AI arms, the aspect of promise and a future of virtual environments putting them to use is a surety.
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Written By Jeffrey Osei-Agyeman
