Odyssey, a company focused on developing artificial intelligence that can understand and simulate the world, has successfully closed a $310 million Series B funding round. The round was led by Natural Capital, with participation from notable investors including Amazon, GV (Google Ventures), AMD, and IQT.

The substantial investment signifies a strong belief in the potential of 'world models' to revolutionize various sectors. Odyssey posits that AI capable of deeply understanding and simulating the world will unlock new frontiers in robotics, scientific discovery, healthcare, education, and gaming, extending beyond the capabilities of current language models.

As part of this funding, Odyssey is forging a close research and compute partnership with Amazon. Both entities share the conviction that general world models are on the cusp of a breakthrough, comparable to the impact of GPT-3 on language AI. This collaboration aims to leverage significant computational resources to push the boundaries of AI's real-world understanding and simulation capabilities.

The company plans to utilize the new capital and compute power to explore these diverse applications and accelerate its research beyond the scope of large language models, aiming to build AI that can more holistically grasp and interact with the complexities of the physical and conceptual world.