I am struggling to understand a single implication of this! How does this generalize to anything other than other than playing retro games in the most expensive way possible? The very intention of this project is overfitting to data in a non-generalizable way! Maybe it's just pure engineering, that good ANNs are getting cheap and fast. But this project still seems to have the fundamental weaknesses of all AI projects:

- needs a huge amount of data, which a priori precludes a lot of interesting use cases

- flashy-but-misleading demos which hide the actual weaknesses of the AI software (note that the player is moving very haltingly compared to a real game of DOOM, where you almost never stop moving)

- AI nailing something really complicated for humans (98% effective raycasting, 98% effective Python codegen) while failing to grasp abstract concepts rigorously understood by fish (object permanence, quantity)

I am genuinely struggling to see this as a meaningful step forward. It seems more like a World's Fair exhibit - a fun and impressive diversion, but probably not a vision of the future. Putting it another way: unlike AlphaGo, Deep Blue wasn't really a technological milestone so much as a sociological milestone reflecting the apex of a certain approach to AI. I think this DOOM project is in a similar vein.

I agree with you, when I made this comment I was simply excited but that didn't last too long. I find this technology both exciting and dystopian, the latter because the dystopic use of it is already happening all over the internet. For now, it's been used only for entertainment AFAIK, which is the kind of use I don't like either, because I prefer human created entertainment over this crap.