OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, just acquired a company making an massively-mulitplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that looks a lot like Minecraft.
That company is Global Illumination (GI), which has a total of eight employees with a wealth of prior experience working at Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Google, Pixar, and Riot Games. GI's most recent project is an open source sandbox MMORPG built for the web using web technologies called Biomes.
Biomes is currently in early access and it's hard to miss the similarities to Minecraft. That fact shouldn't cause any problems, though, seeing as Minecraft-owner Microsoft made a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI earlier this year. Microsoft was also experimenting with AI that plays Minecraft for you earlier this year, so there's certainly potential for collaboration following this acquisition.
There is a chance Biomes gets put on the back burner now as the OpenAI announcement states, "the entire team has joined OpenAI to work on our core products including ChatGPT." However, OpenAI also highlights that the GI team knows how to leverage AI to build digital experiences. It would certainly be a waste not to take advantage of that experience for new products/services.
OpenAI recently released GPTBot, which is tasked with crawling the web for new information in a bid to train and improve its future large-language learning models. Meanwhile, the FTC is concerned that ChatGPT could violate users' privacy or spout false information, and OpenAI has had to reassure everyone that ChatGPT isn't getting dumber after receiving complaints.
