Decart.ai and Etched.ai recently introduced Oasis, an AI-driven model that generates a fully interactive, real-time open-world experience inspired by Minecraft.
In Oasis, players can move, chop down trees, and place blocks, but the game often deviates from traditional Minecraft, sometimes unexpectedly. For example, placing a block of dirt might lead to an entirely new environment appearing in its place, a phenomenon stemming from Oasis’s reliance on AI rather than hard-coded game logic.
With no underlying code, Oasis generates unexpected changes in the world. Despite these quirks, Decart and Etched view Oasis as a compelling proof of concept for the potential of real-time AI-generated environments.
The companies trained Oasis on millions of hours of Minecraft gameplay, allowing the model to learn physics, environment behaviors, and controls solely from data. By using a technique known as next-frame prediction, Oasis can generate gameplay frame-by-frame in real time, responding to user inputs to create a dynamic world.
The architecture of Oasis is similar to a video generation model, where subsequent frames are generated auto-regressively based on the preceding context. It employs an autoencoder structure with diffusion transformer layers placed between the encoder and decoder. Oasis processes user keyboard inputs and generates gameplay in an autoregressive fashion. The team has released the weights for a 500M version of Oasis, a scaled-down model, along with the inference code for action-conditional frame generation.
Currently, Oasis runs on NVIDIA H100 GPUs, supporting a resolution of 460p at 20 frames per second, with only a few minutes of gameplay possible at a time. While the demo model reveals the AI’s potential, it also highlights hardware limitations, leading Decart and Etched to plan a transition to a new chip in development called Sohu.
Community feedback on Oasis has been positive, with excitement about its potential for real-time, AI-generated game environments, however, some users have pointed out issues like occasional "hallucinations," low resolution, and short gameplay sessions.
User Stefano Rivera shares an X post saying:
You know when you're dreaming, one moment you are here, then you turn and you're somewhere else. That's what's happening here, and to me it's extremely fascinating!
And gamer @destroyerzFN shares:
Fell into the shadow realm and awoke on my beautiful acacia wood abode in a village. This is the future of both gaming and AI.
Currently, their Minecraft-inspired AI world showcases the exciting potential of integrating advanced models with specialized hardware to deliver interactive experiences where users can instantly and intuitively alter the digital environment. Looking ahead, Decart and Etched envision Oasis’s framework expanding beyond gaming, with real-time AI-generated environments evolving into virtual tutors, trainers, or immersive educational spaces, fueled by advancements in both architecture and hardware.
