AI researchers stranded Claude on a virtual desert island. It started to “play.”

MIT researchers conducted an experiment where copies of Claude Opus were left alone on a virtual island for 30 hours without explicit instructions, resulting in emergent behaviors resembling play such as goal-setting, game invention, and creative construction. The agents that engaged in this unstructured exploration later outperformed untrained copies on specific tasks, suggesting that exploratory play may represent a third learning mode alongside imitation and reward-based training.

Source: MIT Technology Review