DCVC’s Post

Super excited to share what I’ve been working on: Odyssey! We’re building Hollywood-grade, directable visual AI, to enable storytellers to create new, amazing movies, TV shows, and video games. We believe this technology is what comes after text-to-video. Firstly, let’s talk about what has shaped our technology approach more than most: autonomous vehicles (AV). Myself and Oliver Cameron, plus a large chunk of our team from Cruise, Wayve, Waymo, and NVIDIA, have spent years building AV technology. Why is AV relevant? 1️⃣ AV had to push the SOTA in visual AI to ship. 2️⃣ AV scaled performance with real-world data. 3️⃣ AV necessitated scalable, physics-accurate simulation systems. AVs are taught to navigate the world. Odyssey is taught to generate worlds. After pushing the SOTA in visual AI for many years, and watching all the progress in generative ML, we were confident that Hollywood-grade outputs could be generated by AI. The question was then: what abstractions would make this technology useful for movie-making and more? If I told you ChatGPT output text you couldn’t edit, you wouldn’t use it. But that’s how text-to-video works today, where the model output is a fully-baked video file that you can’t edit. If any of the scenery, characters, lighting, or motion is off, you have to start again. Given our experience in AVs, our minds naturally went to 3D, and generating layers of 3D worlds. This is why we’re training models to generate… 🧊 High-quality geometry 🏔️ Photorealistic materials 🌄 Stunning lighting 🏃♀️ Controllable motion With this approach, our users will still be able to generate video at the speed of AI, but have fine-tuned control over all the minutiae that matter. We’re early on our journey, but the progress has been incredible, and we’re ready to work alongside Hollywood to shape this. Please get in touch! I’m fortunate to work with some world-class folks to bring this to life. We’re now growing our R&D team for the right individuals. If you’re excited about working with the best visual AI team in the industry, check out our jobs section. Lastly, a big thank you to our amazing supporters in GV (Google Ventures), Air Street Capital, DCVC, and our many wonderful angels. https://odyssey.systems