With $21 million in backing from Sequoia and Oren Zeev, the Israeli AI startup Decart came out of stealth today and unveiled what it claims is the first playable "open-world" AI model.

The downloadable model, named Oasis, drives a Minecraft-like game that is created entirely on the fly on Decart's website. Oasis, which was trained on footage of Minecraft gameplay, simulates physics, rules, and visuals by capturing keyboard and mouse motions and creating frames in real time.

Oasis belongs to a new class of generative AI models known as "world models." While several of these models are capable of simulating games, few can do it at Oasis's high frame rates.

Out of curiosity, we gave the demo a go, and we think it still needs work before it can be considered truly enjoyable. We would turn my character around to see a rearranged landscape because Oasis has a tendency to "forget" the level layout rapidly and the resolution is rather poor.

Here, we also question the consequences for copyright. Decart claims that using video from Minecraft for training was approved by Microsoft. Crafts is owned by Microsoft. Is Oasis essentially making an illegal Minecraft copy? The courts will decide that.

Though the demo now plays on Nvidia H100 GPUs, Decart thinks that future iterations of Oasis, which were designed to operate on Etched's forthcoming AI accelerator chips, might produce gameplay in up to 4K.