Jeff Hawke (Co-Founder and CTO at Odyssey) - RAAIS 2026

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 --- The Research and Applied AI Summit (RAAIS) is a community for entrepreneurs and researchers who accelerate the science and applications of AI technology for the greater good. The London-based AI conference is a one-day event covering machine learning, deep learning, reinforcement learning, data science, healthcare and life sciences. RAAIS is presented by The RAAIS Foundation, a non-for-profit with a mission to education and research in AI for the common good. Past speakers have included researchers and leaders from Google DeepMind, Anthropic, ElevenLabs, Isomorphic Labs, Meta, Poolside, Black Forest Labs, Odyssey, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Benevolent AI, Graphcore, Darktrace, Niantic, Stanford, Berkeley, Cambridge, UCL, the University of Toronto, the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, the Tony Blair Institute, The New York Times, and Bloomberg. RAAIS: https://raais.co/ The RAAIS Foundation: https://www.raais.org/ Air Street Capital (https://www.airstreet.com/) is a venture capital firm investing in AI-first companies. The State of AI Report: https://www.stateof.ai/ Air Street Press: https://press.airstreet.com/ Jeff Hawke is co-founder and CTO of Odyssey, a frontier AI lab developing general-purpose world models. Prior to Odyssey, Jeff spent 15 years developing AI in autonomous driving, including pioneering visual policy learning as VP Technology at Wayve. He holds degrees in engineering and computer science from the University of Auckland, Georgia Tech, and completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford.