Odyssey, an artificial intelligence research company focused on frontier world models, has announced a new investment from NVentures, the venture capital arm of NVIDIA, and Samsung Next. The funding will support the company’s push to develop a general-purpose world simulator capable of generating infinitely long, interactive simulations from any starting point.
Founded two years ago, Odyssey has concentrated on researching and deploying advanced world models. Its latest release, Odyssey-2 Pro, is described as a breakthrough general-purpose world model that developers can integrate into applications spanning robotics, gaming, education, defense, and other sectors.
The new capital adds to backing from existing investors, including GV, EQT, Air Street Capital, Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, Guillermo Rauch, Garry Tan, and Kyle Vogt. According to the company, the investment underscores growing confidence that world models are reaching a pivotal moment in their development, comparable to the stage language models occupied around the release of GPT-2.
Odyssey said the funding will enable it to accelerate research to improve simulation length, quality, and interactivity, while scaling the infrastructure needed to train and serve next-generation world models. The company’s research team includes talent recruited from organizations such as DeepMind, OpenAI, ByteDance, Tesla, Waymo, Meta, Wayve, and Luma.
The company said it is working toward what it describes as the GPT-3 equivalent for world models, positioning the latest investment as a step toward achieving that goal.
KEY QUOTE:
“We were impressed with the rapid technical advances demonstrated by Odyssey-2 Pro, showing promising progress towards interactive world simulation, and the early signs of teaching artificial intelligence true cause-and-effect.”
Andy Duong, Investment Director from Samsung Next
