About this episode

Jeff Hawke discusses the significance of world models in AI and presents Odyssey's research advancements.

World models are the bet that AI should learn the world by watching it and acting in it, not just by reading about it. At RAAIS 2026, Odyssey co-founder and CTO Jeff Hawke makes the case: a world model is a neural simulator - an interactive stream of pixels that runs in real time, models physics, and answers back. He walks through Odyssey's four research fronts - streaming interactive pixels (Odyssey-2), joint audio and video (Starchild-1), shared multiplayer worlds (Agora-1, demoed live as a fully generated game of GoldenEye), and PROWL, which sends a reinforcement-learning agent to find and fix a world model's own failures - and argues the field is at its GPT-2 moment: promising, but pre-ChatGPT, with the GPT-3-style commercial unlock still ahead. Recorded at the 10th Research and Applied AI Summit (RAAIS), London, June 2026. Timestamps 00:00 Intro: Nathan on Odyssey and world models 01:05 Jeff Hawke: from self-driving to world models 01:40 The bet — a missing form of intelligence 02:40 Why world models suddenly matter (the late-2025 flip) 03:16 What a world model actually is (and isn't) 04:45 The neural simulator 06:34 Two principles: end-to-end learning and generality 07:19…

People in this episode

Host: Nathan Benaich

Guest: Jeff Hawke

Topics covered

• world models
• AI
• neural simulator
• interactive pixels
• reinforcement learning
• multiplayer worlds

Keywords

• world models
• AI learning
• neural simulator
• interactive pixels
• reinforcement learning
• multiplayer games
• RAAIS 2026

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Odyssey

Places: London

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