YHK - yet another hacker news clone

GPT-6 Astra plays World of Warcraft for the first time with agent-wow

54 points almostlit 3 hours ago 36 comments

w4yai 54 minutes ago | parent

Funny experiment !

There have been bots playing WoW for more than 20 years though.

The protocol has been figured out long time ago and well documented.

aprct 51 minutes ago | parent

I wonder what this will do to the shady gold farming industry.

yourself92 41 minutes ago | parent

Someone at OpenAI is reading this thinking you may have just solved their funding issues

tripleee 39 minutes ago | parent

Nothing because the bots that have already been developed over the last 20 years are much more efficient

blindhippo 30 minutes ago | parent

I have a feeling the same sentiment will ring true across most of the software industry in the next couple years. LLMs are cool, but they don't perform better than purpose built solutions at scale.

StrauXX 23 minutes ago | parent

You can use LLMs to build purpose-built solutions. You can also use LLMs to automate what used to be human tasks.

sergiotapia 20 minutes ago | parent

I disagree. It works with the wow gold farmers because there is a finite set of known states in a videogame. In real life I don't think that's the case.

xdavidliu 8 minutes ago | parent

i recall reading somewhere that Steve Bannon, yes that Steve Bannon, once ran a mmo bot farm in asia in the early 2010s

JSR_FDED 40 minutes ago | parent

You know what I’ve always thought? That playing WoW would become a lot more fun if there were lots of AI players

niceguy1827 36 minutes ago | parent

but none of them can ever match leroy jenkins

Insanity 24 minutes ago | parent

Don’t you mean “leeeeeroooooy jeeeeenkins!”

simianwords 34 minutes ago | parent

Way to miss the point

fatal94 24 minutes ago | parent

You can be both impressed by the technical capabilities of modern models around novel tasks and lament the future state of MMORPGs (or any social internet hobby) and the potential explosion of bots that this will bring.

core_dumped 17 minutes ago | parent

What's the point?

NexRebular 9 minutes ago | parent

Bots do chores, we do fun.

xdavidliu 9 minutes ago | parent

i think they are responding to the point, not missing it

ActionHank 26 minutes ago | parent

We’re speed running getting the llms to do all the fun so that we can all go live under a bridge.

ch4s3 20 minutes ago | parent

I look forward to investing in Bridge Coin.

jrockway 15 minutes ago | parent

Nah, there are plenty of chores for humans to do. While the AIs are composing music and writing code and proving theorems, we still have to do laundry and the dishes.

esaym 6 minutes ago | parent

Dishes need to wash themselves

eatsyourtacos 24 minutes ago | parent

Check out Erenshor- I love playing with bots.

cbg0 19 minutes ago | parent

There are AI players already inside Follower Dungeons. (not LLM-powered though)

btown 12 minutes ago | parent

Don't worry: the natural predator of AI botting, Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat Rootkit, has your back. You may not like its methods, but it's fighting alongside you today, and you're going to learn to love it.

mentos 12 minutes ago | parent

ha well what happens philosophically when bots pass the turing test and no one can actually tell the difference in their behavior vs human?

andrewmutz 7 minutes ago | parent

It could actually be fun if done right.

The worst way to do it would be to have people randomly having their characters farming stuff automatically with AI, and users have no way of telling who is AI and who isnt.

But there are plenty of times where a player would love something in the game that was smarter than an NPC, but less important than another user. It would be fun to fill out your raid group or party with a few automated players when you can't fill it for real. Or be able to summon an AI controlled character to duel any time you wanted to practice. It would have to be managed by blizzard and the AI characters would need to be visually distinguished in game, of course.

tomaskafka 4 minutes ago | parent

Well Twitter and almost any other social network has a lot of AI players and it’s no fun at all …

singron 30 minutes ago | parent

The initial prompt was to complete all quests in the starting zone. I'm assuming it was able to do that? It's not actually explicitly said anywhere.

I'm also curious if it stopped after that goal or if it kept playing.

thevinter 29 minutes ago | parent

> I was initially skeptical that this would work. And if it did, it would require hours to complete with dead ends along the way.

> But it turns out it completed the task easily in 40 minutes with 0 deaths and minimal complications.

aeturnum 22 minutes ago | parent

Crazy! I can't imagine what WoW would be like with bots! Another new frontier broken open for AI lol.

Joking aside it is interesting to see that a general model can adapt to a world like this, but I think the contrast between the model being "naive" and then needing to build special-purpose code to allow it to interact somewhat begs the question of the experiment. Customization will always be needed so how interesting is it that an un-customized model can play with a highly customized harness?

DeepYogurt 20 minutes ago | parent

Gold farming is solved!

moomoo11 14 minutes ago | parent

everyone’s talking about gold bots

what about world mobs and ai pvp players?

like how cool would it be to be roaming around and there’s a group of 3 or 4 horde or alliance bots wandering around as a war band or maybe they’re doing a special mission.

or a world boss who could engage in more interesting ways than just a fight.

a richer world would be cool in a game where it’s so casual and optimized there’s almost zero social interactions anymore and the world is barren.

i haven’t played wow since cata but that’s what my friends say about it to me. even in cata the world would feel dead.

charcircuit 14 minutes ago | parent

Blizzard and not catching botters. Name a more iconic duo.

Mistletoe 7 minutes ago | parent

I wanted AI to do my taxes and my work and me to play WoW.