Never mind Doom running on a potato, or whatever – the next generation of ridiculous computing belongs to Minecraft YouTuber Sammyuri, who built a working chatbot in the perennially popular voxel building sandbox.

Dubbed CraftGPT, there's nothing large about the language model and chatbot Sammyuri built inside Minecraft. Trained on the TinyChat dataset and coded in Python, CraftGPT has just 5,087,280 parameters and a vocabulary of 1,920 tokens spread across six layers, making it decidedly a small language model.

That said, the build itself is anything but small. 

The complete CraftGPT machine – a fully functional computer from the most basic logic gate upward – occupies a massive space of 1,020 x 260 x 1,656 blocks. That's large enough that the Distant Horizons mod had to be installed on the server Sammyuri used to build the system in order to show the whole thing without it falling outside the maximum render distance for the Minecraft engine.

A video posted to YouTube over the weekend demonstrates the massive size of the model, with its corresponding massive display screen and keyboard – all built using the Minecraft element called redstone, a material that can be used to create basic circuits. Or full-fledged computers capable of running their own version of Minecraft, or a chatbot, as Sammyuri proved. 

I built ChatGPT with Minecraft redstone!

Don't expect peak performance out of CraftGPT, though. As Sammyuri put it, expectations for the system should be kept low.

"The model is very prone to going off topic, producing responses that are not grammatically correct, or simply outputting garbage," Sammyuri said in the readme for CraftGPT on GitHub. "The conversations in the showcase video show the model at its best, not necessarily at its average performance."

CraftGPT also has a context window of just 64 tokens, so conversations need to be quite brief, too – no asking CraftGPT to write that research report for you, unfortunately. 

The whole thing is also quite slow – and we mean that as graciously as possible.

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"[CraftGPT is] built using vanilla redstone mechanics, and should work in vanilla, but it could take upwards of 10 years to generate a response without increasing the tick rate," the developer said. The tick rate in Minecraft refers to the game's loop speed. In other words, how often the system updates the world. For Minecraft, that typically defaults to 20 ticks per second.

To bypass the decade-long wait to get a response to "how are you today," Sammyuri used a variant of the game engine known as the Minecraft High-Performance Redstone Server (MCHPRS) that is designed specifically for redstone computation projects in the Minecraft engine, a hobby with a niche but passionate following. Even then, don't expect mind-blowing performance out of your massive Minecraft chatbot. Toss CraftGPT into MCHPRS and it still takes around two hours to produce a response, Sammyuri noted – and that's at 40,000x speed.

So don't give up your favorite chatbot for CraftGPT. Or do – this one's probably just as practically useful and reliable as the rest. ®