Amazon, Nvidia and AMD are betting big on Odyssey ML and its 3D worlds
Amazon, Nvidia and AMD funds invest $310 million in the AI startup Odyssey ML, which develops world models simulating the physical world in 3D. This financing round values Odyssey $1.45 billion. Other investors include CIA-linked fund IQT, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, and investor Elad Gil.
Odyssey utilise AWS as preferred cloud provider and runs on chips Trainium from Amazon. Founders Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke come from the autonomous vehicle sector. Cameron claims that the models include the physiquethe body language and the dynamicelements that linguistic models cannot capture. The team of 55 people works in London, Zurich and Palo Alto.
World models represent the next big issue after pure linguistic models. Instead of predicting text, they aim to simulate the physical world: physique, dynamic et spatial relationships. Yann LeCun, head of AI at Meta, has long argued that linguistic models alone will not achieve human-level intelligence. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis sees them as a key step toward general AI, and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li is pursuing the same idea with her startup World Labs.
