In this first of our two-part series on Minecraft and Artificial Intelligence, Katja Hofmann (Microsoft Research) and Will Guss (OpenAI and Carnegie Mellon University) talk about how they are using Minecraft to push the boundaries of AI research, and how lava might one day help a house-cleaning robot know where your carpet is. NOTE: We filmed our interview with Katja remotely during the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, so apologies for the sound quality! Watch Part 2 here: https://youtu.be/v0prAZhW2wM Want to try out Project Malmo? Go here to train your first AI agent to navigate a lava maze in Minecraft with Azure Machine Learning: https://aka.ms/azureml-rl And if you want to help build AI (even just by playing Minecraft) check out https://minerl.io --- With thanks to Sean Kuno of Microsoft Research, and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Additional AI Agent footage thanks to @wgussml and the team from CMU: William Guss, Brandon Houghton, Stephanie Milani & Nicholay Topin.