From driving the world to dreaming it

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.Timestamps00:00 Intro: Nathan on Odyssey and world models01:05 Jeff Hawke: from self-driving to world models01:40 The bet — a missing form of intelligence02:40 Why world models suddenly matter (the late-2025 flip)03:16 What a world model actually is (and isn't)04:45 The neural simulator06:34 Two principles: end-to-end learning and generality07:19 The "GPT-3 of world models" and four research themes08:46 Odyssey-2: streaming, interactive pixels10:33 Starchild-1: generating audio and video together13:03 Agora-1: multiplayer world models13:57 Live demo: the room plays GoldenEye16:20 PROWL: improving the model by breaking it18:39 Where Odyssey goes next19:55 Still the GPT-2 era21:30 Q&A: physics limits, safety, compute cost, merging with LLMs