Silicon Valley’s innovative spirit continues to thrive with the recent unveiling of a demo for Oasis, an AI-generated game developed by the hardware startup Etched. This groundbreaking project allows players to create and modify virtual environments in real time, effectively constructing a complex game from the ground up. Drawing inspiration from the virtual universe depicted in Ernest Cline’s celebrated sci-fi narrative, “Ready Player One,” Oasis has been crafted in collaboration with San Francisco-based AI developer Decart, marking it as the first playable game of its kind.
Game Development Meets AI Innovation
Etched showcased the Oasis demo through a post on Twitter (now known as X) this past Thursday. In this interactive experience, players navigate a vibrant, block-filled landscape, engaging in activities such as building and dismantling terrain and obstacles. Dean Leitersdorf, CEO and co-founder of Decart, emphasized the project’s research-oriented nature, stating, “This first version of Oasis is for research and proof-of-concept, showing that AI models can even do this. There’s no monetization there—it’s all free. It’s all just to show that this can be done from a research perspective.”
Introducing Oasis: the first playable AI-generated game.
We partnered with @DecartAI to build a real-time, interactive world model that runs >10x faster on Sohu. We’re open-sourcing the model architecture, weights, and research.
Here’s how it works (and a demo you can play!): pic.twitter.com/X39vkx3WID
— Etched (@Etched) October 31, 2024
The vision behind Oasis is the brainchild of Robert Wachen, co-founder and COO of Etched, and Dean Leitersdorf, both of whom share a passion for harnessing AI in gaming. Their collaboration began in 2022, inspired by the capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-3. As Wachen articulated, “Simply put, Etched operates like Nvidia, building next-generation hardware, while we’re like OpenAI, developing AI models designed to run on that hardware.” This synergy positions Etched as a pioneer in laying the groundwork for AI-driven gaming experiences.
Choosing to base the Oasis demo on the popular game Minecraft was a strategic decision, as its open-world framework allows for dynamic content creation—a challenge that the team aimed to tackle using AI. Wachen elaborated on the technology behind Oasis, explaining, “Unlike traditional graphics engines, Oasis relies on artificial intelligence to produce each pixel in real time without the use of a game engine.” This innovative approach involves two critical components: the model’s weights, which embody its intelligence, and the inference engine that processes these weights, enabling real-time content generation.
Since the demo’s release, interest in Oasis has surged dramatically, with traffic overwhelming the hosting site. Leitersdorf expressed astonishment at the response, noting, “We were insanely shocked by the scale of the people trying to use the demo. Hundreds of thousands of people came in, and we had to turn most away.” Currently, the demo operates on Nvidia’s H100 Tensor Core GPUs, but Etched is developing its own chipset, Sohu, which promises to deliver performance several times faster than Nvidia’s offerings.
Despite initial skepticism regarding the viability of their venture, Wachen reflected on the journey, stating, “The reality is this did not make sense as a business when we started. Building a 0 million chip project for a million model, you had to get lucky and see that it was going to blow up—and after ChatGPT, it started to become more obvious that it would.”
Etched and Decart are among the latest developers striving to bring the vision of “Ready Player One” to life through AI technology. Notably, Cline himself has entered the arena, launching Promptopia, a tool that empowers players to create in-game items using text prompts. However, Wachen remains unfazed by the competition, emphasizing a collaborative spirit: “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 things. The hope is in a month or two, someone else will release something even cooler.”
