Oasis is an interactive AI experience that turns Minecraft into a nightmarish hallucination
Editor’s take: In Ernest Cline’s 2015 novel Ready Player One, “Oasis” was a virtual interactive dystopia with life-like graphics and too many Delorean replicas fighting to uncover the game’s hidden Easter eggs. In Etched’s AI-fueled dystopia, Oasis is an interactive model where we can play a hallucinated clone of the worst Minecraft world ever imagined.
Cupertino startup Etched recently unveiled Oasis, a new AI experiment described as the first model capable of generating open-world games. Built with the help of Decart, Oasis generates an unlikely Minecraft experience frame-by-frame. Each new frame is derived from the previous and by player input.
Oasis resembles a low-definition Minecraft with dementia because of the garbled approximations of the original pixelated graphics. Etched is “excited” to bring this AI-fueled nightmare to the world, stating that future interactive experiences will be much better and capable of running in 4K graphics thanks to new specialized hardware for AI acceleration.
The developers trained Oasis on a massive video dataset of recorded Minecraft gameplay. The final AI product has no game engine, no logic, and no code at all. The optimized interactive model runs on Sohu, an AI ASIC technology Etched is developing. The current version of Oasis can render its Minecraft approximation in 360p and 20 frames per second, using Nvidia’s H100 GPUs. With Sohu, it can scale to 4K and accommodate 10 users per H100.
good point! we don’t think its better than the original game of course, but its different. for us its mainly a showcase for what can be done with real-time AI content generation. think about imagining something and then creating/interacting with it instantly etc
– Decart (@DecartAI) November 1, 2024
The developer is working on AI-generated interactive video content because an estimated 70 percent of internet traffic is video. Video models are now learning to generate entire physical worlds and games, ultimately bringing new products and business opportunities to professional and amateur developers.
“Whether gaming, generative content, or education, we believe that large, low-latency, interactive video models will be central to the next wave of AI products,” Etched said.
Today’s models are too slow and expensive to run in production environments. However, things should go much smoother with specialized chips like Sohu. Etched is simultaneously building its new AI video models and Sohu chip design to surf this new wave of “exciting” AI products.
When asked why someone should waste their time playing a copyright-infringing abomination resembling Minecraft on acid instead of the original game, Decart AI said that the interactive experience is not designed to be better than the original. Oasis simply showcases what real-time AI content generation looks like in its infancy. The model doesn’t infringe copyright, as Minecraft-inspired open-source projects such as Minetest have thrived without DMCA takedowns from Mojang.
