This Week in Startups
00:23:33 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris, Oliver Cameron
[00:23:33] S0: Let's, let's, let's talk to our guests. Of course. [00:23:35] S1: Let's bring in Oliver. He Oliver Cameron. He is the cofounder and CEO of Odyssey. Of course, they build world models, AI trained on video that learns how the physical world works. So things like robots, cars, drones, physical AI, they could practice inside simulated worlds instead of a real one. We also wanted to break it up because a few weeks ago, Odyssey posted a video of a simulated fruit fly brain flying around inside a world. Its AI was imagining in real time, and we we gotta dig in a little bit more into this. [00:24:05] S0: Thank you for getting Oliver on the program. How are doing, Oliver? I I saw this. I was quite taken by it. And I said to my team, bring me whoever is running this Odyssey ML. Because we're we're playing the video and they summoned you, they found you. This thing went viral. You got 6,200,000 views on it. X.com is where, like, everybody is talking about AI. Like, if you're on... I saw Bill Ackman said the other week, Lon. If you're on X, you feel like you're two weeks ahead of the news cycle because whatever's happening on X, two weeks later, the regular press gets to it, it's true. And so we're looking at what looks like, I don't know, Spain maybe, Portugal, I don't know what town this is, but there's a tiny little bug there flying around that world. Is that world a AI constructed world, or is that a video of the real world from a drone? [00:25:04] S2: So this is entirely imagined by a world model. And importantly, it's, imagined in real time. And so
00:25:04 · Oliver Cameron, Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:25:04] S2: So this is entirely imagined by a world model. And importantly, it's, imagined in real time. And so [00:25:12] S0: Imagined in real time. So it's building the simulation on the fly like a video game might. Lon, when you saw this, did you initially think that across the uncounty valley, did you think this was a real video? [00:25:22] S1: I did. From a drone? The the first... My first impression was the simulated fruit fly was the AI part, and this was just real world footage. And then you read it, and you're like, oh, no. That's just... Like, it looks like a river in a city. And... But, no. It's just a... It's just all made up. [00:25:38] S0: So the question, I guess, is why did you do this? Why did it go viral? And what does it say about simulation theory?
00:25:46 · Oliver Cameron
[00:25:46] S2: To speak a little bit about Odyssey and what we do. And again, thank you, for having me on. So we build world models, and we believe that world models are a true foundation model. What we do is we train them on vast visual observations of the world, and then they gain this really cool ability to predict the possible futures of the world. And so through this training process, what they do is they learn physics, they learn dynamics, cause and effect, all of these fundamentals of the universe. And so what is this useful for? Well, we believe that WARP models are essential to enabling a billion robots and a trillion agents. For robots, WARP models are this general brain, and it allows robots to better predict the consequences of their actions, and to thus better interact with the world. And then for agents, world models generate infinite environments for agents to learn within, and this increases their performance on tasks that they would learn inside those environments. And so what we did here is say, hey, there is this really cool, you know, fruit fly project. Someone's mapped the brain of an... You know, a species. That's incredible. Let's now put that brain inside an environment that's being generated in real time. And will the fly decide to fly? Will it just sit there? What will it do? And as you can see here, the fly flew around as a fly does. And I I think the reason it went viral, you know, is that it's this perfect perfect moment of saying, are we living in a simulation? Right? We we have increasingly capable artificial intelligence. This dream of superintelligence is no longer a dream. And I think it's on lots of people's minds now that with increasingly advanced technologies, whether all of this is in fact a simulation. And so I I think it just sparked that thought in people. It's like, wow. Okay. Now now we're starting to see real visual evidence that this might be a simulation.
00:27:56 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:27:56] S0: And for people who don't know, Lon, there is a concept called simulation theory. Yes. You as my very astute follower of science fiction can probably do an exceptional job explaining what simulation theory is and why this, you know, is a milestone in some ways, a waypoint [00:28:19] S1: Sure. [00:28:19] S0: In simulation theory from your perspective.
00:28:19 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:28:19] S0: In simulation theory from your perspective. [00:28:21] S1: I mean, thankfully, we have a great pop culture reference point that I think we can all sort of agree on, which would be the, 1999 classic, The Matrix, which sort of proposes, I think, the general idea. Get away from human beings or the batteries or whatever. But the idea that we could all be living in or our consciousness could be living in some sort of a virtual reality simulation of the world rather than the real world, and that we don't have any objective way to know because everything we sense about the world is through our senses. And so if we could suspend a fly brain in a computer simulation like this and it believes it's a fly, it's flying around, it's flying in a virtual world, and it has every reason to think that that's a real world. What if we had much more sophisticated computers, much faster GPUs, much more, you know, like, elaborate models? Could any one of our brains be in this kind of a computer simulation as well walking around a virtual world, doing a virtual podcast, believing that it's real Yes. But not really is is, the idea. There is a great documentary called Glitch in the Matrix that plays on this idea and that speaks with people who believe we are, in fact, in a simulation that I that I really recommend if you wanna learn. [00:29:37] S0: What percentage? We we have p doom a lot. Oliver, what percentage are you? Somebody building world models and putting essentially, this is a simulated fruit fly. Yeah? This is a... How do you simulate the fruit fly's existence then?
00:29:37 · Jason Calacanis, Oliver Cameron
[00:29:37] S0: What percentage? We we have p doom a lot. Oliver, what percentage are you? Somebody building world models and putting essentially, this is a simulated fruit fly. Yeah? This is a... How do you simulate the fruit fly's existence then? [00:29:55] S2: There was this open source project, that takes this mapped brain and then connects it to actions, that it can perform. So I wouldn't necessarily take from this that this is the brain of a fruit fly as a fruit fly operates in our physical world. It's a sort of, I don't know, baby version of that. Sure. But, yeah, on its way. [00:30:17] S0: Got it. And and at some point, are you planning to put... Is there a way to connect a fruit fly's brain or some a mouse's brain, a rabbit's brain? Obviously, there's Neuralink and other things. But in three, four, five, six years, what would you be simulating here in the world model? Could you actually connect a biological creature to a world model and just shoot it into their brains?