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

Decart, an Israeli AI company that emerged from stealth today with $21 million in funding from Sequoia and Oren Zeev, says it has released the first playable “open-world” AI model.

The model, called Oasis, which is available for download, supports a demo on Decart's website: a Minecraft-like game that is generated end-to-end on the fly. Oasis is based on videos of Minecraft gameplay, recording keyboard and mouse movements and generating frames in real time to simulate physics, rules and graphics.

Oasis is part of an emerging category of generative AI models called “world models.” Many of these models can simulate games – but only a few achieve frame rates as high as Oasis.

I tried the demo out of curiosity and would say it still has a long way to go before it becomes a truly enjoyable experience. The resolution is quite low and Oasis tends to quickly “forget” the level layout – I would turn my character around just to see a rearranged landscape.

I'm also wondering what effects copyright law has here. Decart doesn't say it received Microsoft's blessing to train using Minecraft footage. (Microsoft owns Minecraft.) Is Oasis essentially making an unauthorized copy of Minecraft? The courts have to decide that.

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

“(These) models can augment even 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 offers new possibilities for user interaction, such as text and audio prompts that guide gameplay.”