Minecraft remains remarkably popular a decade or so after it was first released, thanks to a unique mix of quirky gameplay and open world building possibilities. A knock-off called Oasis, released last month, captures much of the original game's flavor with a remarkable and weird twist. The entire game is generated not by a game engine and hand-coded rules, but by an AI model that dreams up each frame. Oasis was built by an Israeli AI startup called Decart in collaboration with Etched, a company that designs custom silicon, to demonstrate the potential of hardware optimized to power transformer-based AI algorithms. Oasis uses a transformer AI model, similar to the one that powers a large language model--only trained, apparently, on endless examples of people playing Minecraft, to dream up each new video frame in response to the previous one and to user input like clicks or mouse moves.

The news: ChatGPT can now search the web for up-to-date answers to a user's queries. Previously it was restricted to generating answers from its training data, and had limited web search capabilities. But now, ChatGPT will automatically search the web in response to queries about recent information such as sports, stocks, or news of the day, and can deliver rich multi-media results. How to use it: The feature is available now for the chatbot's paying users, but OpenAI intends to make it available for free later, even when people are logged out. It also plans to combine search with its voice features.