Decart’s AI simulates a real-time, playable version of Minecraft

Descartesan Israeli artificial intelligence company that emerged from stealth today with $21 million in funding from Sequoia and Oren Zeev has released what it claims is the first playable “open-world” AI model.

Called Oasis, the model, which is available for download, runs a demo on Decart’s website: a Minecraft-like game that is generated from end to end. Trained on videos of Minecraft gameplay, Oasis takes in keyboard and mouse movements and generates real-time frames that simulate physics, rules and graphics.

Oasis is part of a new category of generative AI models called “world models”. Many of these models can simulate games – but few at such high frame rates as the Oasis.

I tried the demo out of curiosity and I’d say it has a ways to go before it’s a really fun experience. The resolution is quite low and Oasis tends to quickly “forget” the level layout – I would only turn my character over to see a rearranged landscape.

I also wonder about the copyright implications here. Decart doesn’t say it got Microsoft’s blessing to train on Minecraft footage. (Microsoft owns Minecraft.) Is Oasis basically creating an unauthorized copy of Minecraft? It is up to the courts to decide.

However, Decart believes that future versions of Oasis, which were optimized to run on Etched’s upcoming AI accelerator chips (the demo is currently running on Nvidia H100 GPUs), could generate up to 4K gameplay.

“(These) models can even augment modern entertainment platforms by generating content on the fly according to user preferences,” Decart writes in a blog post. “Or perhaps a gaming experience that provides new opportunities for user interaction, such as text and audio prompts that control gameplay.”