Amazon, Nvidia, and AMD bet $310 million on AI startup building 3D world models

Amazon, Nvidia, and AMD are putting $310 million into world model startup Odyssey ML, now valued at $1.45 billion. CIA-linked fund IQT and Google chief scientist Jeff Dean are also backing the round.

Other backers include CIA-linked fund IQT, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, and investor Elad Gil. Odyssey uses AWS as its preferred cloud provider and runs on Amazon’s Trainium chips. Founders Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke come from autonomous vehicles. Cameron says the models understand physics, body language, and dynamics, things language models can’t capture. The 55-person team works out of London, Zurich, and Palo Alto. World models are the next big bet after pure language models. Instead of predicting text, they aim to simulate the physical world: physics, dynamics, and spatial relationships. Meta AI chief Yann LeCun has long argued language models alone won’t reach 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 at her startup World Labs.AdDEC_D_Incontent-1Ad Follow The Decoder for AI news, background stories and expert analyses.