There is a game you can play right now in which not one line of the game was ever written. No designer placed the trees. No programmer coded the physics or the way the light falls on the grass. You press a key to walk forward, and the world simply appears in front of you, invented on the spot, around twenty times a second, by an AI that is guessing what should come next. It looks like Minecraft because it learned from millions of hours of Minecraft. But there is no Minecraft underneath. There is only the machine, imagining.

The uncanny part is what happens when you turn around. Place a block, look away, look back, and it may be gone, replaced by a hillside that was never there a moment ago. The world has the logic of a dream, which is close to what it actually is. The system keeps only a short memory of where you have been, and when that memory fills up, it improvises, the same way you never quite notice the walls rearranging behind you in a dream.

The company doing this is called Decart, and it is Israeli. It was founded in 2023 by Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, who met in the reserves of Unit 8200, and it is run out of Tel Aviv. On May 18 it raised 300 million dollars at a reported four billion dollar valuation, in a round led by........

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