DeviationAn Israeli AI company that emerged from stealth today with $21 million in funding from Sequoia and Oren Zeev, has released what it claims to be the first playable “open world” AI model .

Called Oasis, the model, available for download, powers a demo on the Decart website: a Minecraft-type game generated on the fly, from start to finish. Trained on Minecraft gameplay videos, Oasis records keyboard and mouse movements and generates images in real time, simulating physics, rules and graphics.

Oasis is part of an emerging category of generative AI models called “models of the world.” A lot of these models can simulate games – but few at frame rates as high as Oasis.

I tried the demo out of curiosity, and I’d say it still has a way to go before it becomes a truly fun experience. The resolution is quite low and Oasis tends to quickly “forget” the layout of the levels: I would turn my character around to see a reorganized landscape.

I also wonder about the copyright implications here. Decart does not say he had Microsoft’s blessing to practice on Minecraft images. (Microsoft owns Minecraft.) Is Oasis essentially creating an unauthorized copy of Minecraft? It is for the courts to decide.

Decart believes, however, that future versions of Oasis, optimized to run on Severe Upcoming AI accelerator chips (the demo currently runs on Nvidia H100 GPUs) could generate up to 4K gameplay.

“(These) models can even augment modern entertainment platforms by generating content on the fly based on 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 guiding gameplay.”