Millions of hours of gameplay data used to train this AI model

The artificial intelligence (AI) company Decart, which developed the generative AI model Oasis, has created what it calls the first playable AI video game.

Kids and adults alike love Minecraft. They like it so much that there are likely hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of hours of gameplay on YouTube and other platforms.

But what can be done with all that data? The people behind Decart.AI and Etched saw an opportunity to create a different kind of video model, “a game engine trained on millions of gameplay hours.”

This is the ‘AI Minecraft Game’ powered by Oasis, Decart’s generative AI model. Decart claims that Oasis is the first playable AI model to exist, as it creates open-world games based on keyboard inputs.

What’s interesting about this “game” is that it’s entirely generated using AI. Oasis, the generative AI model, receives users' inputs from their keyboard and generates real-time gameplay, which includes physics, game rules, and graphics.

According to the MIT Technology Review, Decart's technique for creating the Minecraft world is “next frame prediction.” For this technique to work, they had to train their model on millions of hours of Minecraft gameplay data. Perhaps the most striking thing about AI Minecraft is that no single line of code was written to make the game possible.

Forbes said that, as with most AI models, the game may be prone to hallucinations, and some have reported that AI Minecraft is unable to keep up with the inner logic of the game.

While I didn’t see a single non-playable character (NPC) in the game, I was playing. Apparently, NPCs are more intelligent with AI, and they can react and interact in“more complex ways” to their environments, and you are the player.

The game also uses AI to track your performance, playing style, and skill level, meaning that it can “adjust the strength of monsters according to the player’s equipment and experience value.”

However, we only get a few minutes to play the game, meaning that this feature may be more prominent later in development.

While the creators claim that AI can create more diverse and realistic terrain, which may end up looking more natural, I had trouble understanding where I was and where I was going while playing.

Finally, the company claims that AI can help automate some of the complex structures one might make in Minecraft. The generative AI model can “automatically generate detailed building plans based on simple instructions or sketches from the player.”

It can even complete some of the work with help from the user.

On X, Decart posted that they hope that these developments can soon be coined a “Generative Interactive Experience.”

Some users on X expressed concern about copyright infringement. However, most comments commended the creators and said that people don’t understand the technology behind the game.

One person said, “A lot of people are making fun of this, and I don't think they truly grasp the ramifications of this tech. They're all just saying "we already have Minecraft.” Others explained that this game is reminiscent of some kind of fever dream.

Cybernews has reached out to Microsoft, which acquired Minecraft and its creators Mojang Studios in 2014.