Episode 16 | Oliver Cameron, CEO at Odyssey

In this episode of the Benevolent Disruptors Interview Series, we were joined by Oliver Cameron, co-founder and CEO of Odyssey. Oliver ran product and engineering at Udacity alongside Sebastian Thrun, then co-founded the self-driving company Voyage. After Cruise acquired Voyage, he led the launch of Cruise’s fully driverless service in San Francisco. In late 2023 he co-founded Odyssey with Jeff Hawke, formerly of Wayve, to build general-purpose world models, and the company has just released Odyssey-3. Throughout our conversation we cover: Physics is to world models what coding is to language models. Odyssey-3 is state of the art on nearly every world model metric, but the one Oliver cares about most is physics accuracy. He traces Odyssey’s origins back to a lesson from self-driving: by 2018, cars had near-perfect perception and still couldn’t drive themselves. What was missing was the human ability to predict what happens next.  Why a billion robots need a general brain. Today drones learn from drone footage and driverless cars learn from driving data. Oliver believes this narrow approach will always be brittle. A world model learns from the whole world instead, so a car that has never seen an elephant on the road still understands how big and fast one can be. Odyssey-3 lets you embody almost anything, including a duckling in New York City, and Oliver explains why that playful demo points to something much more serious. Building a frontier lab across Palo Alto, London and Zurich. Oliver shares Odyssey’s two hardest problems. The first is data infrastructure that he expects will eventually exceed the scale of YouTube. The second is the research challenge of making generated video as stable as generated language. Oliver and Chris also discuss three related questions: why big tech’s data advantages haven’t turned into world model leadership, why startups can be more stable than the giants, and how the shift in tone from Dragons’ Den toward Shark Tank reflects a new confidence among European founders. 👉 Learn more at www.bnvtcapital.com