Odyssey

Odyssey is an AI research lab founded in late 2023 by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke. The company develops general world models: causal, multimodal systems designed to understand and simulate the world, with the conviction that world models will become a new class of foundation model alongside language and video models.

Four frontier systems have emerged from the work. Odyssey-2 is a general-purpose world model generating interactive video streams at 20 frames per second in real time; Odyssey-2 Max extends it to state-of-the-art physics accuracy for general world simulation. Starchild-1 is described as the first real-time multimodal world model, and Agora-1 is a multi-agent world model in which several participants share and interact within the same simulation. The technical span runs from causal modeling and physics simulation to real-time video generation, autonomous systems and foundation-model research, with applications in AI research, autonomous vehicles and simulation.

The team has been drawn from DeepMind, Tesla, Waymo, Meta, Apple and Wayve, and counts contributions to landmark systems including DeepMind Gemini, DeepMind Veo, Wayve GAIA and Tesla FSD. The company is backed by strategic and venture investors among them Amazon, GV, AMD, NVIDIA and Natural Capital, alongside prominent AI researchers.