Someone built an AI in Minecraft and 'CraftGPT' is nothing short of spectacular, frankly

In the by now long and established tradition of weird stuff happening in the world of gaming, somebody has built an actual AI within Minecraft.

As TechSpot reports, this is the work of YouTuber Sammyuri, who is no stranger to pulling off novel stuff in Minecraft, and this latest installment is called 'CraftGPT' - dropping a hint as to the inspiration here.

This is a small language model (SLM) AI running using Minecraft's Redstone mechanics (which is akin to the electricity of the blocky world).

As you might imagine, the resulting 5 million parameter model is pretty limited, and incredibly slow - CraftGPT can give you a response in around two hours. This is with the Minecraft High Performance Redstone Server upping the tick rate by 40,000x - without this, you'd be looking at literally years of waiting (a bit like when you first open File Explorer after booting up your PC with Windows 11).

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The creator warns that the AI's responses may not be up to much either, but the sheer scale of this Minecraft creation - CraftGPT sprawls across a volume of 1020 x 260 x 1656 blocks - and the fact that this can be done and works at all is highly remarkable.

Sammyuri explains that the model was "trained in Python on the TinyChat dataset of basic English conversations" and it "has an embedding dimension of 240, vocabulary of 1920 tokens, and consists of 6 layers."

As a commenter observes, this is certainly a big step on from building a Redstone calculator, that much is clear. Of course, as noted, it isn't very practical, but that's not the point - much like running Doom on, well, a calculator, or indeed an Apple Lightning adapter. It's more a case of 'why not' than 'why', of course.