From clip-makers to simulators: Odyssey's new world models

From clip-makers to simulators: Odyssey's new world models

From Air Street Press by Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital)

May 19, 2026 · 5 min

About this episode

The episode discusses Odyssey's new world models, Starchild-1 and Agora-1, and their technical innovations.

Odyssey just shipped two new world models. Starchild-1 generates synchronized audio and video in real time at up to 24 fps, responding to streaming text, speech, or action input - the first real-time multimodal world model. Agora-1 puts up to four players into a shared simulated deathmatch on GoldenEye, with every frame each player sees generated on the fly while the model holds a shared world state across all participants. We walk through both releases, the technical contributions behind them - a causal distillation pipeline from a bidirectional audio-video foundation model, an asynchronous KV-cache that handles the audio/video clock mismatch, and a decoupled simulation/rendering architecture for the multi-agent case - and why world models are a different shape of system than the clip-makers (Veo, Sora, Kling) that have dominated generative video for three years. Odyssey is an Air Street Capital portfolio company. Jeff Hawke, Odyssey's co-founder and CTO, presents this work at RAAIS 2026 in London on June 12.

People in this episode

Host: Nathan Benaich

Guest: Jeff Hawke

Topics covered

  • world models
  • real-time audio video
  • multimodal systems
  • simulation
  • generative video
  • gaming

Keywords

  • Odyssey
  • Starchild-1
  • Agora-1
  • real-time
  • multimodal
  • simulation
  • generative video
  • deathmatch
  • audio-video

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Odyssey, Air Street Capital

Places: London

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