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.

"What if you could say'Hey, add a flying unicorn here'? Or'Turn this into Star Wars,' and it's all Star Wars," says Leitersdorf. A major limitation right now is hardware. They relied on Nvidia cards for their current demo, but in the future, they plan to use Sohu, a new card that Etched has in development, which the firm claims will improve performance by a factor of 10. This gain would significantly cut down on the cost and energy needed to produce real-time interactive video. It would allow Decart and Etched to make a better version of their current demo, allowing the game to run longer, with fewer hallucinations, and at higher resolution.