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

Called Oasis, the model, which is available for download, powers a demo on Decart’s site: a Minecraft-like game that’s generated on the fly, end to end. Trained on videos of Minecraft gameplay, Oasis takes in keyboard and mouse movements and generates frames in real time, simulating 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 few at frame rates as high as Oasis.

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

I wonder, too, 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? That’s for the courts to decide.

Decart believes, however, that future versions of Oasis, which was 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 may even augment modern entertainment platforms by generating content on the fly according to the user preferences,” Decart writes in a blog post. “Or perhaps a gaming experience that provides new possibilities for the user interaction such as textual and audio prompts guiding the gameplay.”