Silicon Valley computer hardware startup Etched released a demo of its new AI-generated game called Oasis, which lets players create and modify virtual environments, effectively building a complex game from scratch in real time.

The Minecraft clone, named after the virtual universe created by Ernest Cline for the iconic sci-fi novel and movie “Ready Player One,” was created in partnership with San Francisco-based AI developer Decart. It’s being billed as the first playable AI-generated game.

Etched showcased the Oasis demo in a Twitter (aka X) post on Thursday. In the demo, players could navigate a block-filled environment, moving, building, and destroying terrain and obstacles as they go.

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

Oasis is the brainchild of Harvard graduate Robert Wachen, co-founder and COO of Etched, and Israel Institute of Technology alum Leitersdorf. As Wachen explained, the duo met in 2022 and were inspired by OpenAI’s GPT-3, and Wachen and Leitersdorf launched Etched and Decart in 2022 and 2023, respectively.

“Simply put, Etched operates like Nvidia, building next-generation hardware, while we’re like OpenAI, developing AI models designed to run on that hardware,” Leitersdorf explained. “Etched is laying the groundwork, and Decart is building AI-driven experiences on top.”

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

“There are two key components here: the weights, which represent the intelligence of the model, and the descriptor that runs the weights, known as the inference engine,” Wachen explained. “This setup allows the AI to create elements in real-time and efficiently handle large numbers of users.”

According to Leitersdorf, in the past 24 hours, since Decart and Etched came out of stealth and posted the demo on Twitter, interest in Oasis caused a surge in traffic that nearly took down the site.

“We were insanely shocked by the scale of the people trying to use the demo,” he said. “Hundreds of thousands of people came in, and we had to turn most away.”

While the Oasis demo was created using Nvidia’s H100 Tensor Core GPUs, Etched is developing its own chipset, called Sohu, that the company said would be several times faster than Nvidia’s GPU.

Getting to this point hasn’t been easy, and there was doubt at the beginning that Etched would be successful, Wachen said.

“The reality is this did not make sense as a business when we started,” Wachen said. “Building a $100 million chip project for a $10 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 the latest developers looking to bring “Ready Player One” to reality using AI, including the book' author himself. Just last month, Cline’s Readyverse Studios launched Promptopia, a tool that allows players to create in-game items through text prompts.

Wachen isn’t concerned about the competition, and said the code and weights for Oasis 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 things,” Wachen said. “The hope is in a month or two, someone else will release something even cooler.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward