NVIDIA and Samsung Back Odyssey’s Push Toward a General-Purpose World Simulator

• Odyssey received funding from NVentures and Samsung Next to expand development of its world modeling systems.
• The company said the investment will help scale research, infrastructure, and deployment of Odyssey-2 Pro through its API.

Odyssey announced new funding from NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, and Samsung Next to accelerate its research toward a general-purpose world simulator.

“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,” said Andy Duong, Investment Director from Samsung Next, in an official news release.

Odyssey-2 Pro represents the company’s latest step toward that goal. Through its API, developers can integrate the model into applications spanning robotics, gaming, education, and defense.

In its announcement, Odyssey said the investment reflects shared conviction that world models have reached a critical inflection point, similar to where language models stood around the release of GPT-2. The company plans to accelerate research on increasing simulation length, quality, and interactivity, and to scale the systems necessary to train and serve next-generation world models, supported by a research team recruited from DeepMind, OpenAI, ByteDance, Tesla, Waymo, Meta, Wayve, and Luma.

🌀 Tom’s Take:

Backing from NVentures and Samsung Next signals that major platform players see world models as reaching a critical inflection point.

Source: Odyssey