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 The "GPT-3 of world models" and four research themes
08:46 Odyssey-2: streaming, interactive pixels
10:33 Starchild-1: generating audio and video together
13:03 Agora-1: multiplayer world models
13:57 Live demo: the room plays GoldenEye
16:20 PROWL: improving the model by breaking it
18:39 Where Odyssey goes next
19:55 Still the GPT-2 era
21:30 Q&A: physics limits, safety, compute cost, merging with LLMs
