en.Wedoany.com Reported - Odyssey Artificial Intelligence Lab (focused on building world models) recently announced the completion of $310 million in early-stage funding, valuing the company at $1.45 billion. The round was led by Natural Capital, with participation from Amazon.com Inc., AMD Ventures, GV, EQT, IQT, and others.
Existing investors Elad Gil, Google LLC Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, Applied Intuition Inc. co-founder and CEO Qasar Younis, Y Combinator Inc. President and CEO Garry Tan, Vercel Inc. founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch, and Cruise LLC founder Kyle Vogt also participated in the round.
In addition to the funding, Odyssey has entered into a new agreement with Amazon Web Services Inc., designating AWS as its preferred cloud provider, with access to its Trainium custom chips and instances. Trainium is AWS's custom chip series designed to help train and deploy AI models at scale.
Odyssey co-founder and CEO Oliver Cameron stated that world models represent a new class of foundation models capable of understanding and simulating the world itself. He believes that partners across the industry need to work together to push the frontier of general world models, aiming to achieve the GPT-3 moment in this field.
World models are AI systems designed to learn and simulate how the physical and digital worlds operate. Unlike large language models, world models build internal representations of reality, including physics, causality, and time, enabling them to simulate or predict the outcomes of actions before taking them. Such models are crucial for training physical AI agents, robots, autonomous vehicles, and other AI systems that interact with the physical world, improving safety, reducing training time from months to days, and preparing them for unexpected situations.
Over the past three years, Odyssey has built its own world models, releasing Odyssey-2 Max, which achieves the highest level of physical accuracy in general world simulation; Starchild-1, introducing the first real-time multimodal world model; and Agora-1, bringing multi-agent interactivity in shared world simulations.
The world model category is growing. In recent months, AI developer Decart.ai Inc. raised $300 million at a nearly $4 billion valuation to develop world models Lucy and Oasis. AI pioneer Yann LeCun's startup AMI Labs raised $1.03 billion in March to train world models, and world model startup Runway AI Inc. raised $315 million in February. These startups face competition from tech giant Google, which launched Project Genie, a tool allowing developers to quickly generate 3D virtual environments from prompts, integrating the company's powerful Nano Banana Pro image generator and Genie 3 world model into a single software package.
This article is compiled by Wedoany. All AI citations must indicate the source as "Wedoany". If there is any infringement or other issues, please notify us promptly, and we will modify or delete it accordingly. Email: news@wedoany.com
