Flexion’s humanoid robot running on Odyssey’s world model
Odyssey has launched Odyssey-3, a world model that the Palo Alto AI lab says can control robot arms and humanoids, drive a car, fly drones and play video games. A research preview is available now, the company said on Thursday.
World models learn from large amounts of visual data to predict how a scene will change next, including how actions affect what happens. Odyssey says its new model gives machines a general understanding of the world before they learn a specific task.
“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.
The benchmark claims
Odyssey-3 Pro scored 66.1 on the video-to-video test of Physics-IQ Verified, the highest score reported on that leaderboard, according to Odyssey. That score uses the best of eight attempts per task. The benchmark, from Anates Labs and DeepMind, asks models to continue videos of real physics experiments. The comparison includes models from Nvidia and Black Forest Labs.
Odyssey also says the model ranked first in three of the four categories of the WorldMark benchmark. That result comes from the company’s own evaluation.
Six kinds of machine
Odyssey showed the model in six areas. With tens of hours of robot demonstrations, it completed tasks with robot arms. It also recovered from errors that were not in those demonstrations, such as a missed grasp.
The humanoid robot company Flexion has built control policies on Odyssey-3. Odyssey says they handled lighting changes that caused the tested baselines to fail.
The company also drove a car on real roads in India with a driving policy trained on about 20 hours of data. Odyssey-3 also guided drones indoors, generated environments for training AI agents and played Grand Theft Auto V.
From $310m to a product
Self-driving car veterans founded Odyssey. In June it raised $310 million at a $1.45 billion valuation, with Amazon and AMD Ventures among the investors.
Odyssey is one of several companies building world models. Last month AMD agreed to buy Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs startup for $8.2bn in stock. In September, startup Emulate, founded by former DeepMind world-model researchers, was reportedly in talks to raise $700m. Nvidia offers its own open Cosmos world models.
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