Never mind the cost of computing, OpenAI said the Upwork contractors alone cost $160,000. Though to be fair, manually labeling the whole data set would’ve run into the millions and taken considerable time to complete. And while the computing power wasn’t negligible, the model was actually quite small. VPT’s hundreds of millions of parameters are orders of magnitude less than GPT-3’s hundreds of billions.
Still, the drive to find clever new approaches that use less data and computing is valid. A kid can learn Minecraft basics by watching one or two videos. Today’s AI requires far more to learn even simple skills. Making AI more efficient is a big, worthy challenge.
In any case, OpenAI is in a sharing mood this time. The researchers say VPT isn’t without risk—they’ve strictly controlled access to algorithms like GPT-3 and DALL-E partly to limit misuse—but the risk is minimal for now. They’ve open sourced the data, environment, and algorithm and are partnering with MineRL. This year’s contestants are free to use, modify, and fine-tune the latest in Minecraft AI.
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