Odyssey unveils Odyssey-3 world model for robots, cars

Odyssey, an AI lab in Palo Alto, released Odyssey-3 on Thursday. It is a foundation world model that the company says can control robot arms and humanoids, drive a car, fly drones and play Grand Theft Auto V. A research preview is available now.thenextweb+1

Odyssey wants one pretrained model to serve many kinds of machines, so they don't each have to learn every task from scratch. The launch adds to a growing field of world-model startups and big companies doing the same work.thenextweb

One model, six domains

World models learn from large amounts of visual data to predict how a scene will change, including how actions affect what happens next. Odyssey said Odyssey-3 was trained on a "vast dataset of visual observations of the world" and builds on three years of the company's earlier models.businesswire

"Odyssey-3 is a big step toward a single intelligence that can understand and operate in the world around us," said Oliver Cameron, Odyssey's co-founder and chief executive. "World models give physical agents a foundation of knowledge they can carry from one machine, environment, or task to another."thenextweb+1

The company showed the model in six areas. After tens of hours of robot demonstrations, it ran robot arms and recovered from errors that weren't in those demonstrations, such as a missed grasp. Humanoid robot company Flexion has built control policies on Odyssey-3. Odyssey says those policies handled environmental changes, such as different lighting, better than the baselines it tested. A driving policy trained on about 20 hours of simulated data drove a car on real roads in India. The model also steered drones indoors, generated environments for training AI agents, and played Grand Theft Auto V with early signs that what it learned carried over to other games.businesswire+1

Benchmark claims

Odyssey said its Odyssey-3 Pro version scored 66.1 on the video-to-video test of Physics-IQ Verified, the highest score reported on that leaderboard. The score uses the best of eight attempts per task. In the benchmark, models continue videos of real physics experiments, and the comparison includes models from Nvidia ↘ 2.94% and Black Forest Labs. The company also says the model ranked first in three of the four categories of the WorldMark benchmark, a result that comes from Odyssey's own evaluation.thenextweb

Crowded field

Odyssey was founded by self-driving car veterans. In June it raised a $310 million Series B at a $1.45 billion valuation, led by Natural Capital, with Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. ↘ 2.25%, AMD Ventures, GV and others taking part.businesswire+1

Competition is growing. AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. ↘ 3.90% agreed last month to buy Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion in stock. Emulate, a startup founded by former DeepMind world-model researchers, was reportedly in talks in September to raise $700 million. Nvidia also offers its own open Cosmos world models.thenextweb