Minecraft’s AI Revolution: From Smart Creepers to GPT-4 Agents
In 2016, Microsoft Research launched Project Malmo, an open-source AI experimentation platform built on top of Minecraft. Around NeurIPS 2019, MineRL released an OpenAI Gym interface for Minecraft with a large dataset of human gameplay and the flagship ‘Obtain Diamond’ task. In 2022, OpenAI trained a Video PreTraining (VPT) model on 70,000 hours of YouTube Minecraft videos, enabling the agent to craft wooden and stone tools and a diamond pickaxe after 24,000 actions. Baritone is an open-source Minecraft bot with advanced pathfinding, using an A-like search and reportedly 30× faster path calculation than its predecessor. In early 2025, Ryan Boulds