Meta unveils AI agent CICERO that competes with humans in gameplay

Meta has unveiled CICERO, the first artificial intelligence (AI) agent to achieve human-level performance in the popular strategy game Diplomacy. CICERO is a step forward in human-AI interactions, with AI that can engage and compete with people in gameplay using strategic reasoning and natural language.
The technology behind CICERO could one day lead to more intelligent assistants in the physical and virtual worlds.
Diplomacy has been viewed as a nearly impossible challenge in AI because it requires players to understand people’s motivations and perspectives, make complex plans and adjust strategies, and use language to convince people to form alliances.
“CICERO marks the beginning of a new era for AI that can collaborate with people in gameplay using strategic reasoning and natural language processing, and the learnings from technology like this could one day lead to intelligent assistants that can collaborate with people,” said Meta in a communiqué.
While CICERO is only capable of playing Diplomacy, the technology behind it is relevant to many other applications. For example, current AI assistants can complete simple question-answer tasks, like telling you the weather — but what if they could hold a long-term conversation with the goal of teaching you a new skill?
“By open-sourcing the code and models, we hope that AI researchers can continue to build off our work in a responsible manner. Additionally, to gain access to the data, interested researchers can submit a proposal to our RFP in the area of human-AI cooperation through natural language using Diplomacy as the foundational environment. We’re excited about the potential for future advances in human-AI collaboration and seeing how others build on our research,” said Meta.