AI News: Microsoft Unveils “Muse” a new Generative AI Model for Gaming

On Wednesday, February 19, 2025, Microsoft introduced the World and Human Action Model (WHAM), “Muse.”

Muse is its first generative AI model capable of generating game visuals and controlling actions based on a 3D understanding of game worlds.

Key Points

• Muse, developed by the Microsoft Research Game Intelligence and Teachable AI Experiences (Tai X) teams in collaboration with Games Studios’ Ninja Theory.
• Muse, using WHAM-1.6B with 1.6 billion parameters, was trained on over 1 billion images and controller actions, equivalent to more than 7 years of continuous human gameplay from Ninja Theory’s Bleeding Edge.
• Microsoft conducted interviews with 27 game creators globally, ranging from indie developers to AAA studios, to align Muse with real needs.
• Muse excels in generating complex gameplay sequences lasting up to 2 minutes.
• Muse is available now for researchers and developers. Its model weights, sample data, and WHAM Demonstrator can be accessed on Azure AI Foundry.
• Short interactive AI game demos will soon be testable on Copilot Labs, with broader updates expected in 2025.

Background

The Muse project commenced in December 2022, prompted by the release of ChatGPT, which motivated Hofmann (senior principal research manager at Microsoft Research) to investigate transformer-based models for gaming.

Utilizing years of Bleeding Edge data from Ninja Theory, the research team expanded training from a V100 cluster (100 GPUs) to H100s.

In initial demonstrations, such as by researcher Tim Pearce, illustrated Muse’s improvement over 10k, k, and 1M training updates—advancing from basic recognition to mastering mechanics like after 1M updates.

News Gist

On Wednesday, February 19, 2025, Microsoft introduced Muse, its first generative AI model for game creation, leveraging the World and Human Action Model (WHAM-1.6B).

Muse generates visuals and complex gameplay, trained on 7+ years of Ninja Theory’s Bleeding Edge data.

Now available on Azure AI Foundry, it supports developers globally.