One legendary Minecraft player has spent months building a purported "CraftGPT," a small language model AI styled after ChatGPT and assembled entirely in Minecraft, which can finally fulfill mankind's greatest calling: talking to a computer inside a computer.
Minecraft legend Sammyuri, last seen three years ago with the bold declaration that "I made Minecraft in Minecraft with redstone," is the architect of CraftGPT. In a remarkably short video released on September 28, Uri lays out the sheer volume of work that went into this functional Minecraft AI chatbot – and the volume it occupies.
After making Minecraft^2, Uri says "I ran out of motivation to build redstone for quite a while and focused on other areas of life," so CraftGPT hasn't actually been in the works for a full three years. Rather, it "was built over a period of many months, with a significant amount of planning and dedication."
The numbers under the hood of the mod-augmented custom build, which is technically feasible in vanilla Minecraft but would operate much more slowly and only render in chunks, boggle my mind and gast my flabber.
"The build occupies a volume of 1020x260x1656 blocks," Uri explains, putting the frame volume of CraftGPT's many parts at around 439 million blocks. Obviously, a lot of those blocks are empty air, so the actual block count of the build would be substantially lower. These blocks weren't all individually placed by hand, either; Minecraft map editors allow for much faster and more sophisticated blueprinting and pasting. But the footprint volume speaks to the scope and complexity of the redstone at work here.
Minecraft's redstone wiring system, capable of sending and storing input and power signals analogous to electricity, has evolved from a simple way to open your base's secret door to a bottomless gateway drug for programming and computer science. CraftGPT limit tests what the material can feasibly power, including, as I understand it:
- A tokenizer which translates input text into sequences of data to be analyzed
- Token embedding array which processes that data
- Matrix multipliers which service processing and computation work
- A KV cache which stores computations for faster reuse
- Token output module to submit text responses
- Multiple layers of this and other infrastructure amounting to 6.171 million bytes of simulated memory
"The model has 5,087,280 parameters, trained in Python on the TinyChat dataset of basic English conversations," Uri says. This is technically a small language model because of the limited scope of training and responses. Large language models, the LLMs that everyone and their dog is talking about today, have much wider use cases and scrape a lot more material for their fact base.
"It can produce a response in about 2 hours when the tick rate is increased using MCHPRS (Minecraft High Performance Redstone Server) to about 40,000x speed," Uri clarifies. I've never used ChatGPT, but from what I hear it takes slightly less than two hours to respond. But factor in the redstone debuff and that's still downright incredible.
In the video, Uri demonstrates CraftGPT's conversational ability, hovering over an in-game keyboard. (Back in the day, that keyboard build alone would be impressive.)
Uri asks, "How are you today?"
The response is: "I am feeling quite happy today, thank you for asking."
Showing the AI's "basic factual knowledge," Uri asks "what color is the sky?" This is where things take an existential turn. The response reads: "The sky is bright blue, and the sky looks very beautiful." Is that our sky, or the Minecraft sky – that is, the limitless blue void enveloping CraftGPT?
Responses can vary and may have errors or redundancies, but the flexibility of the AI is impressive given its medium. Existentialism peaks when Uri asks, "What do you think about technology?"
"I believe technology is very important for our daily lives," the response reads.
"Did you know you are a machine?" Uri continues. (Goodness, Uri. You can't just ask that.)
"Yes, I think it is quite interesting, especially with new technology and technology," the final response reads. As far as coincidences born of limited language training go, this response is equal parts serendipitous and head-turning.
On Github, Uri admits "you shouldn't have high expectations" if you want to use this for yourself. "The model is very prone to going off topic, producing responses that are not grammatically correct, or simply outputting garbage.
"The model also has a very small context window of only 64 tokens. The conversations in the showcase video show the model at its best, not necessarily at its average performance."
The CraftGPT world is available for download, with the other brightest minds in redstone already poking through it like budding engineers dismantling the family VCR with poor prospects of reassembling it before movie night begins.
The response from Minecraft players has been tremendous so far, with some calling it the most advanced redstone build ever released. It will be interesting to see what results and responses other players see in practice, not to mention how the build may be stress tested.
You'll find installation and operation instructions on Github. Just be warned: Uri says "You will need a machine with at least 32GB of RAM to even load the server, but ideally you'd want 64GB or more."
Meanwhile, in the world of mortals: After 14 years and nearly $500,000 raised for charity, one dedicated Minecraft player is finally set to reach the fabled end-of-world Far Lands – a feat that may just be "one of the single greatest achievements" in gaming.
