A New Era in Gaming: ‘Minecraft’ Clone Created by AI in Real Time

Silicon Valley computer hardware startup Etch has unveiled Oasis, its new AI-powered game that lets players create and modify virtual environments and build complex gameplay from scratch in real-time.

Named after the virtual universe created by Ernest Cline, the Minecraft clone for the classic science fiction and film “Ready Player One” was created in collaboration with San Francisco-based AI developer Decart. It is being billed as the first playable AI generated game.

Etched revealed a demo of Oasis in a post on Twitter (aka X) on Thursday. In the demo, players can explore a block-filled environment, moving as they go, building and destroying lands and obstacles.

“This first edition of Oasis is a proof of concept for research, showing that even AI models can do this,” Decart CEO and co-founder Dean Leitersdorf told Decrypt. “There's no monetization there – it's all free. All this just goes to show that it can be done from a research perspective.

Oasis is the brainchild of Harvard graduate Robert Washen, co-founder and COO of Etched, and Israel Institute of Technology alum Leitsdorf. As Wachen explained, the two met in 2022 and OpenAI's GPT-3, and Wachen and Leitersdorf launched Etched and Decart in 2022 and 2023, respectively.

Simply put, Etch works like Nvidia, building next-generation hardware while we, like OpenAI, develop AI models designed to run on that hardware,” Leitersdorf explained. “Etched is laying the groundwork, and Descartes is building AI-based experiences.”

Etched and Decart chose to base the Oasis demo on Minecraft because the open-world environment supports dynamic content, a technical challenge they wanted the AI ​​to overcome. Unlike traditional graphics engines, Oasis relies on artificial intelligence to render each pixel in real time without using a game engine, Wachen said.

“There are two key components here: the weights, which represent the model's knowledge, and the descriptor that drives the weights, known as the inference engine,” Wachen explained. “This setup allows AI to create elements in real time and efficiently manage multiple users.”

According to Leitersdorf, in the past 24 hours since Descartes and Etch came out of hiding and posted the demo on Twitter, interest in the oasis has nearly brought the site down due to traffic.

“We were shocked at the amount of people trying to use the display,” he said. “Hundreds of thousands of people came in, and we had to turn around a lot.”

While the Oasis display was created using Nvidia's H100 Tensor Core GPUs, Etched is developing its own chipset, called Sohu, which the company says will be several times faster than Nvidia GPUs.

Getting to this point wasn't easy, and there was doubt at first that ETAD would succeed, Washen said.

“The reality is, this didn't make sense as a business when we started,” Wachen said. “You had to be lucky to build a $100 million chip project with $10 million and see if it was going to blow up—and after ChatGPT it became more and more clear that it was going to happen.”

Etched and Decart are the latest developers looking to bring “Ready Player One” to reality using AI, including the book's author. Just last month, Cline's Readyverse Studios created Promptopia, a tool that allows players to create in-game items with text prompts.

Wachen says he's not concerned about the competition, and that Oasis's code and weights are available on GitHub for developers to examine.

“We want to share this with the world. We want to show people what's possible, and now we've given them the tools to build their own,” Washen said. “Hopefully in a month or two, someone else will release something even cooler.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward.