Researchers are transforming chatbots into online agents that play games, query websites, schedule meetings, build bar charts and do more.
The widely used chatbot ChatGPT was designed to generate digital text, everything from poetry to term papers to computer programs. But when a team of artificial intelligence researchers at the computer chip company Nvidia got their hands on the chatbot’s underlying technology, they realized it could do a lot more.
Within weeks, they taught it to play Minecraft, one of the world’s most popular video games. Inside Minecraft’s digital universe, it learned to swim, gather plants, hunt pigs, mine gold and build houses.
“It can go into the Minecraft world and explore by itself and collect materials by itself and get better and better at all kinds of skills,” said a Nvidia senior research scientist, Linxi Fan, who is known as Jim.
The project was an early sign that the world’s leading artificial intelligence researchers are transforming chatbots into a new kind of autonomous system called an A.I. agent. These agents can do more than chat. They can use software apps, websites and other online tools, including spreadsheets, online calendars, travel sites and more.
In time, many researchers say, the A.I. agents could become far more sophisticated, and could replace office workers, automating almost any white-collar job.
“This is a huge commercial opportunity, potentially trillions of dollars,” said Jeff Clune, a computer science professor at the University of British Columbia who previously worked on this kind of technology as a researcher at OpenAI, the San Francisco start-up that built ChatGPT. “This has a huge upside — and huge consequences — for society.”
