Imagine an AI that can not only understand your instructions but also build complex structures in Minecraft, just like a human player. That's the ambitious goal of researchers behind "Nebula," an AI model designed to bridge the gap between language and action within the blocky world of Minecraft. Traditional "language-to-action" AI struggles to handle the nuances of human conversation, especially in interactive environments. Think about it: when we collaborate on a task, we rely heavily on context, shared understanding, and even non-verbal cues. Previous AI models often miss this crucial context, leading to errors and misinterpretations. Nebula attempts to change this by considering the full history of a conversation. This approach allows the AI to build a more nuanced and holistic understanding of the instructions given. The researchers tested Nebula's performance by having it follow instructions from human players in Minecraft. Remarkably, Nebula’s ability to accurately interpret and execute instructions almost doubled compared to older models. However, successfully navigating the Minecraft universe isn’t just about understanding language. It also involves understanding shape, location, and orientation within a 3D space. Nebula proved to be quite good at building simple structures like towers and rows but stumbled when tasked with more complex shapes such as squares and cubes. Intriguingly, the research also revealed that the way we currently evaluate these AI systems might be flawed. Current metrics often penalize the AI for correctly interpreting vague instructions in a way that differs slightly from the human player. For example, if instructed to place a block ‘in a corner,’ the AI might choose a different corner than the human intended, but technically, both are correct. To address this, the team developed new evaluation methods focused on the *relative* position of blocks rather than their *absolute* coordinates. This approach gives us a more meaningful measure of the AI's true understanding of spatial relationships. While Nebula represents significant progress, building truly human-like intelligence in Minecraft, and beyond, is an ongoing journey. Future work will focus on refining how we teach these AI models, expanding their vocabulary of spatial concepts, and developing more sophisticated ways to evaluate their performance. The ultimate goal is to create AI systems that seamlessly integrate into collaborative environments, not just in games but also in real-world scenarios, from assisting in design tasks to controlling robots in complex environments.