Today, AI firm Decart emerged from stealth mode with $21 million in funding from Sequoia and Oren Zeev. What it is touting is the first playable "open-world" AI model.

Dubbed Oasis, the model - downloadable in an open research paper here - powers a demo on Decart's site: a Minecraft-like game generated entirely on the fly. The model itself was trained on videos of Minecraft gameplay and takes keyboard and mouse movements as inputs to generate frames in real time. Oasis simulates physics, rules, and graphics on the fly as well.

Oasis is a new class of generative AI models that are referred to as "world models." Many of these can play simulations of games - but not many at Oasis frame rates.

I tried the demo because I was curious, but honestly has to be a lot more before it would ever be fun. It only runs at a relatively low resolution, and Oasis forgets the layout pretty quick, too. When turning my character around to walk in a different direction, I found myself getting face to face with rearranged landscapes.

I am also concerned about the copyright implications here. Decart does not say that it received Microsoft's permission to train on footage of Minecraft. For one thing, Microsoft owns Minecraft. Is Oasis creating an unauthorized copy of Minecraft? That is for courts to decide.

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 deliver up to 4K gameplay.

These 'models may even augment modern entertainment platforms by generating content on the fly according to user preferences,' writes Decart in a blog post. 'Or maybe a gaming experience that allows new opportunities for user interaction, for example, by textual and audio prompts which guide gameplay.'".