Be prepared to get your ass kicked by a computer in an entirely different way. It was recently revealed that the next-level geniuses at Google’s DeepMind project have created a new AI model that can play basic games just like a human. It’s called the ‘Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent’, but it’s known as SIMA to its friends.
In a recent blog post, it was explained that SIMA can carry out ‘a variety of tasks’ in a video game setting, and so far, the team at DeepMind have trained the AI successfully on No Man’s Sky, Teardown, Valheim, Satisfactory, and Goat Simulator 3.
Let It Play Games For You
The experts at DeepMnd offered up a relatively plain-language explanation of what SIMA is:
SIMA is an AI agent that can perceive and understand a variety of environments, then take actions to achieve an instructed goal. It comprises a model designed for precise image-language mapping and a video model that predicts what will happen next on-screen. We finetuned these models on training data specific to the 3D settings in the SIMA portfolio.
There’s the potential for SIMA to effectively interact with ‘any virtual environment’, the blog post reads. More than 600 basic skills and commands have been tested out on SIMA, and so far, the AI can handle actions that take no more than ten seconds to complete. This includes:
- Shooting asteroids in No Man’s Sky
- Finding water in Valheim
- Driving a car in Goat Simulator 3
- Farming iron ore in Satisfactory
Over time, SIMA will be improved on an iterative scale, getting better with each major update. There are expectations that one day, DeepMind will instruct SIMA to ‘find resources and build a camp’, and it’ll do it. It’ll be interesting to see how this differs from what we have now. As an example, I can boot up Sons of the Forest and instruct Kelvin to cut down some trees and build a structure, and he’ll do that autonomously.
How can SIMA change the game enough to be considered important?
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that RuneScape’s creator is releasing a new MMO
