Readers older than a certain age will remember those little scrunched-up pieces of paper that were essential to your after-school routine. Those bits of paper held the keys to your kingdom — in other words, it’s where we scribbled down cheats for GTA III, San Andreas or Vice City. Microsoft is rendering the modern equivalent of paper cheats or guides (the internet) almost irrelevant by shoving Copilot into some of its games, Minecraft first.
What is my purpose?
The AI integration into games was announced during the search giant’s Surface event yesterday, where the headline of the show was the shiny new Copilot+ PCs and, unsurprisingly, a couple of upgraded Surface laptops. That’s all to be expected from Microsoft, but the company’s plans to infect its games with AI got a raised eyebrow out of us.
To give Copilot the necessary social skills to pull something like this off, Microsoft has kitted it out with OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model. The big kicker is GPT-4o’s ability to see, hear and talk in a more natural human-like way — with OpenAI cutting down response time to an average of 320ms.
Read More: Give Siri a break – here’s how to install Microsoft’s Copilot on your Mac
Microsoft showed off a demo of a player interacting with the new GPT-4o-fied Copilot helping out a new Minecraft player and teaching him the ropes, like how to craft a stone sword. The AI can comprehend general questions, and even give you help depending on where a player is standing, or the materials in their inventory.
Coming Soon: Copilot 🤝 Minecraft pic.twitter.com/yncla0gCG9
— Microsoft Copilot (@MSFTCopilot) May 20, 2024
Microsoft confirmed that this is all happening locally on your device, and won’t get back to its servers or be used to train its other language models. We’d rather Microsoft put AI’s considerable talents to better use instead of negating the millions of wikis out there — which is where it’s probably getting all its info from anyway.