is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
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Google DeepMind’s new AI agent learned how to play a bunch of video games — including No Man’s Sky, Valheim, and Goat Simulator 3 — to become a viable “interactive gaming companion.”
The new agent tool, SIMA 2, builds on its earlier iteration, SIMA (Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent), which DeepMind released in March 2024. It also incorporates Google’s Gemini AI for the first time, meaning the agent can go beyond simply following instructions to “understand a user’s high-level goal, perform complex reasoning in pursuit, and skillfully execute goal-oriented actions within games,” even ones it hasn’t seen before, according to a DeepMind blog post. It’s currently being released to some academics and developers as a limited research preview.
Despite SIMA 2’s gaming prowess, creating a consumer-facing gaming helper isn’t the broader goal here, members of the DeepMind team told The Verge during a Wednesday briefing. Jane Wang, a senior staff research scientist at DeepMind, called it “a really great training ground” for potentially transferring the skills to real-world environments one day.
And, as usual, it all comes back to the ever-intensifying AGI race between Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. “This is a significant step in the direction of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), with important implications for the future of robotics and AI-embodiment in general,” DeepMind’s blog post states.
Joe Marino, a research scientist at DeepMind, doubled down on that, saying that SIMA 2’s ability to take actions in a virtual world and handle environments it has never seen before is a “fundamental” step toward AGI — and potentially toward building a general-purpose robot down the line.