Google DeepMind’s new AI agent realized methods to play a bunch of video video games — together with No Man’s Sky, Valheim, and Goat Simulator 3 — to change into a viable “interactive gaming companion.”
The brand new agent device, SIMA 2, builds on its earlier iteration, SIMA (Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent), which DeepMind launched in March 2024. It additionally incorporates Google’s Gemini AI for the primary time, that means the agent can transcend merely following directions to “perceive a person’s high-level objective, carry out complicated reasoning in pursuit, and elegantly execute goal-oriented actions inside video games,” even ones it hasn’t seen earlier than, based on a DeepMind weblog submit. It’s presently being launched to some teachers and builders as a restricted analysis preview.
Regardless of SIMA 2’s gaming prowess, making a consumer-facing gaming helper isn’t the broader objective right here, members of the DeepMind staff informed The Verge throughout a Wednesday briefing. Jane Wang, a senior employees analysis scientist at DeepMind, known as it “a very nice coaching floor” for doubtlessly transferring the talents to real-world environments in the future.
And, as standard, all of it comes again to the ever-intensifying AGI race between Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. “This can be a important step within the path of Synthetic Basic Intelligence (AGI), with necessary implications for the way forward for robotics and AI-embodiment usually,” DeepMind’s weblog submit states.
Joe Marino, a analysis scientist at DeepMind, doubled down on that, saying that SIMA 2’s capability to take actions in a digital world and deal with environments it has by no means seen earlier than is a “basic” step towards AGI — and doubtlessly towards constructing a general-purpose robotic down the road.
