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Yahoo
19 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Opinion: Get out of the way, Ottawa, and let the 'one-person unicorns' run
Sam Altman's prediction that artificial intelligence will spawn 'one-person unicorns' — billion-dollar companies run by individual founders — sounds like Silicon Valley hype. Yet new data suggests Canada's policy-makers should take Altman's forecast seriously, not as a reason to tax and regulate, but as an opportunity to unleash our entrepreneurs' natural advantages. AI startups are shattering every conventional business metric: fastest to reach 100 million active users, fastest to hit US$1 billion in valuation, fastest to scale from zero to US$10 billion. Recent standouts like World Labs, Safe Superintelligence and Lovable have all sprinted to billion-dollar valuations with teams of fewer than 50 people. We may be experiencing the dawn of a capital efficiency era that should thrill our innovators. The United States is deploying what we call 'bully capital' in AI and corporate venture investing. According to KPMG, global venture capital (VC) funding hit US$368.3 billion in 2024. The U.S. captured $209 billion of this total, with just five startups accounting for $32.2 billion in Q4 alone. This isn't a rising tide lifting all boats. Asia-Pacific VC money fell to a nine-year low. Europe declined year-over-year. Meanwhile, Canada managed a modest 10 per cent rise to US$4.2 billion — but strip out Clio's $670-million outlier round and our sector actually dropped 16 per cent. The math is brutal: US$209 billion in the U.S. versus US$4.2 billion in Canada. The U.S. economy is roughly 13 times larger than Canada's, yet America raised 50 times more venture financing. Why the difference? In the U.S., corporate venture money accounted for more than half the 2024 total. In Canada, this category barely registers. Early-stage investment's new efficiency stems from AI's unique ability to automate what once required armies of workers. A single developer now deploys AI agents that handle customer service, curate content and optimize operations, all simultaneously. When algorithms replace head count, traditional constraints — hiring, training, managing — evaporate. Consider the entertainment parallel. U.S. YouTuber MrBeast generates US$82 million annually with a lean crew. These micro-multinationals are individuals using globally distributed digital platforms. Hollywood's talent-centric model is migrating to technology, powered by AI's multiplicative productivity gains. The implications for Canadian competitiveness are profound. Our universities produce world‑class AI research: by Stanford's 2024 AI Index, Canada ranks among the top countries for AI publications and the share of highly cited papers, with Toronto and Montreal recognized as global hubs. This intellectual edge has been built over decades with broad, light‑touch supports from federal granting agencies and SR&ED (the 'scientific research and experimental development' tax credit). Our point is to avoid layering new, program‑heavy projects on top of what already works: solo AI founders need speed and simple rules, not procedure. The conventional government response to these new AI possibilities will be to want to 'support' the transition through subsidies, bureaucratic 'incubators' and programs, likely byzantine programs. This approach fundamentally misunderstands the AI revolution. One-person unicorns succeed precisely because they avoid institutional friction. They need speed, not committees or special commissions. Resources, not consultants. Clear rules — preferably no rules — not regulatory complexity. Ottawa's optimal strategy is simplicity itself: maintain R&D tax credits, ensure stable intellectual property protection, and resist micromanagement. When human genius replaces money or infrastructure as the scarcest resource, success flows from entrepreneurial freedom. The venture industry is adapting rapidly. Specialized funds now offer agency-style investments, advancing resources to promising individuals before they form teams. Day One Ventures backs solo founders from day one. Latent Ventures launched a 'Solopreneur Fund.' These investors understand that backing exceptional individuals often beats funding legacy corporate structures. Smart money tracks data signals that predict individual success: GitHub code velocity, open-source follower counts, real-time user engagement. These indicators let private investors validate solo-founder traction far faster than government-backed financing. For Canadian business builders, the message is clear: master lean operations, use AI for automation, build personal brands that accelerate customer acquisition. The future belongs to those who command massive resources with minimal dilution. The economic math is compelling. If AI startups already achieve extraordinary efficiency, reaching US$1 billion with single-digit staff is actually plausible. Factor in rapidly rising AI power and investor appetite for 'lean' plays and Altman's prediction seems more and more reasonable. Canada faces a stark choice. We can embrace this epochal change by creating the world's most founder-friendly environment for AI expertise. Or we can watch our brightest minds migrate to jurisdictions that understand the new rules. Opinion: We need serious cuts to Ottawa's bloated bureaucracy William Watson: AI predicts Trump tariffs will raise U.S. prices The one-person unicorn era rewards countries that trust markets over mandates, individuals over institutions, innovation over intervention. Canada's competitive advantage lies, not in government programs, but in entrepreneurial excellence unleashed. The future of prosperity belongs to nations that recognize genius and grit as their rarest minerals and give that brilliance maximum freedom to innovate. For Canada, the path forward is clear: step aside and let our AI pioneers get on with changing the world. Ray Sharma, a tech entrepreneur, is co-founder, with publisher, entrepreneur and professor Neil Seeman, of EPS, an educational program to support first-time company founders. Sign in to access your portfolio
Associated Press
a day ago
- Business
- Associated Press
Matrix-3D Goes Open-Source: A New Benchmark for 3D World Generation
SINGAPORE, Aug. 12, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The SkyWork AI Technology Release Week officially kicked off on August 11. From August 11 to August 15, a new model will be unveiled each day, covering cutting-edge models for core multimodal AI scenarios. On August 12, the world model Matrix-3D for 3D world generation and exploration was officially open-sourced. Starting from a single input image, it generates high-quality, trajectory-consistent panoramic videos and directly reconstructs navigable 3D spaces. Compared to WorldLabs' output, Matrix-3D enables exploration across significantly larger virtual environments. Matrix-3D open source addresses: By integrating panoramic representation, conditional video generation, and 3D reconstruction modules, Matrix-3D surpasses existing methods in field-of-view range, geometric consistency, and visual quality. It accepts both text and image inputs and generates freely explorable 3D scenes. Matrix-3D achieves state-of-the-art generation quality on panoramic video benchmark datasets, while also attaining industry-leading performance in camera motion control precision. World models like Google's Genie 3 paint a compelling vision of the future. They reveal AI's evolution beyond mere content generation tools into world simulators—systems capable of constructing and simulating entire environments. As AI technology progresses, these models are poised to become critical infrastructure for understanding our world, shaping tomorrow, and ultimately realizing artificial general intelligence (AGI). The open-source release of Matrix-3D for 3D world generation and exploration underscores Skywork's strategic foresight in AI development. This initiative will accelerate development across Skywork's multi-model AI ecosystem. Moving forward, Skywork remains committed to pioneering and open-sourcing advanced AI solutions. By collaborating with global developers and users, we aim to build next-generation platforms that accelerate the global advancement of AGI. View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Skywork AI pte ltd
Business Insider
13-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Top AI researchers say language is limiting. Here's the new kind of model they are building instead.
As OpenAI, Anthropic, and Big Tech invest billions in developing state-of-the-art large-language models, a small group of AI researchers is working on the next big thing. Computer scientists like Fei-Fei Li, the Stanford professor famous for inventing ImageNet, and Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, are building what they call "world models." Unlike large-language models, which determine outputs based on statistical relationships between the words and phrases in their training data, world models predict events based on the mental constructs that humans make of the world around them. "Language doesn't exist in nature," Li said on a recent episode of Andreessen Horowitz's a16z podcast. "Humans," she said, "not only do we survive, live, and work, but we build civilization beyond language." Computer scientist and MIT professor, Jay Wright Forrester, in his 1971 paper "Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems," explained why mental models are crucial to human behavior: Each of us uses models constantly. Every person in private life and in business instinctively uses models for decision making. The mental images in one's head about one's surroundings are models. One's head does not contain real families, businesses, cities, governments, or countries. One uses selected concepts and relationships to represent real systems. A mental image is a model. All decisions are taken on the basis of models. All laws are passed on the basis of models. All executive actions are taken on the basis of models. The question is not to use or ignore models. The question is only a choice among alternative models. If AI is to meet or surpass human intelligence, then the researchers behind it believe it should be able to make mental models, too. Li has been working on this through World Labs, which she cofounded in 2024 with an initial backing of $230 million from venture firms like Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, and Radical Ventures. "We aim to lift AI models from the 2D plane of pixels to full 3D worlds — both virtual and real — endowing them with spatial intelligence as rich as our own," World Labs says on its website. Li said on the No Priors podcast that spatial intelligence is "the ability to understand, reason, interact, and generate 3D worlds," given that the world is fundamentally three-dimensional. Li said she sees applications for world models in creative fields, robotics, or any area that warrants infinite universes. Like Meta, Anduril, and other Silicon Valley heavyweights, that could mean advances in military applications by helping those on the battlefield better perceive their surroundings and anticipate their enemies' next moves. The challenge of building world models is the paucity of sufficient data. In contrast to language, which humans have refined and documented over centuries, spatial intelligence is less developed. "If I ask you to close your eyes right now and draw out or build a 3D model of the environment around you, it's not that easy," she said on the No Priors podcast. "We don't have that much capability to generate extremely complicated models till we get trained." To gather the data necessary for these models, "we require more and more sophisticated data engineering, data acquisition, data processing, and data synthesis," she said. That makes the challenge of building a believable world even greater. At Meta, chief AI scientist Yann LeCun has a small team dedicated to a similar project. The team uses video data to train models and runs simulations that abstract the videos at different levels. "The basic idea is that you don't predict at the pixel level. You train a system to run an abstract representation of the video so that you can make predictions in that abstract representation, and hopefully this representation will eliminate all the details that cannot be predicted," he said at the AI Action Summit in Paris earlier this year. That creates a simpler set of building blocks for mapping out trajectories for how the world will change at a particular time. LeCun, like Li, believes these models are the only way to create truly intelligent AI. "We need AI systems that can learn new tasks really quickly," he said recently at the National University of Singapore. "They need to understand the physical world — not just text and language but the real world — have some level of common sense, and abilities to reason and plan, have persistent memory — all the stuff that we expect from intelligent entities."
Forbes
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
World Labs Ups The Ante In World Generation
Red cup Mushroom, Wild Fly Agaric Amanita Muscaria toxic with poison and hallucinogenic properties. ... More Autumn season in the forest with orange, red and brown leaves from the trees and saturated fall nature colors in Stramproy area in the province of Limburg in the Netherlands, near the Belgian borders on October 24, 2020. (Photo by Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images) A majestic red and black checkerboard pathway, framed by overgrown shrubbery. A manorial structure with bright red windows, on a craggy cliff at the end of a long and winding road. A close pathway through a proliferation of neon mushrooms. What does all of this have in common? It's been generated by groundbreaking technology from World Labs, where the model can extrapolate an entire world based on one single image. It's important that people understand the technology at work here. Just a couple of decades ago, our state-of-the-art technique was to combine thousands of images into a frame-by-frame virtual exploration of a digital space. People used this technology to sell homes with virtual real estate tours, and for other kinds of use cases. This new thing is quite different. The technology is understanding how light and shadow affect surfaces. It's understanding how structures change when viewed from different angles. And most importantly, it's dreaming up a world of color and light, the likes of which we've never seen! World Labs, by the way, is a new player in the industry. It was created by Fei-Fei Li of Stanford fame just this year. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder One of the most prominent points of these public demos that I've been looking at online is that they're bright, bold and beautiful. These larger-than-life scenes are rendered capably in 3-D, and you can move around a little bit, although billing it as a digital 'world' is a little bit misleading. It's not hard to generate an out of bounds error, just by taking a few steps forward. On a side note, the page also caused my browser to crash more than once. Having said all that, this is extremely illuminating, some examples of capability far beyond what we would have thought possible just a few years ago. The closest thing we have to compare it to is the rendered game environments that were until quite recently mostly hand-coded. A Techcrunch article compares the World Labs project to Minecraft, which might appeal to a ten year old player more than a VC. But the ramifications of this are evident, or at least they should be. This isn't just a kid's game. Recent applications like a 'dress-anybody' garment simulator are just the beginning. Further down in the same demo page, you have a presentation attributed to Brittani Natali, who apparently put together a short film using different elements of today's new cutting-edge tools. The full stack included the World Labs generator as well as ElevenLabs, presumably for speech, and other tools like Suno and Blender and CapCut. On another side note, it seems that in addition to a dearth of information for the creator (Brittani Natali) in a google search, ChatGPT was unable to locate any info on this person either. It seems the individual has a pretty thin web footprint! Anyway, as for the film, the result is striking - the viewer of the film experiences walking through a good number of these digital environments quickly, and then centers in on a dilapidated house that's empty and abandoned. Our love affair with abandoned spaces has always been there in the human imagination. We love to explore – and see inside something that no one has seen for years. But what if we're seeing inside something that nobody has ever seen in the history of humanity? These colorful liminal spaces aren't just abandoned – they're brand new. This is the frontier of our world where we set out through uncharted waters to see what lies ahead. Is it scary? Is it exciting? You decide. But the bottom line is that it's here, and it's going to start popping up in unexpected places. I've covered a lot of big headlines this month, from corporate strategies pivoting quickly, to hardware wars that are determining who will benefit from the next generation of models. But it's also very interesting to keep an eye on the leapfrogging that AI is doing in multimedia – from Stable Diffusion and Dall-E, to Sora, to this new thing - where pretty soon, metaverse environments are going to create themselves.
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Odyssey's new AI model streams 3D interactive worlds
Odyssey, a startup founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, has developed an AI model that lets users "interact" with streaming video. Available on the web in an "early demo," the model generates and streams video frames every 40 milliseconds. Via basic controls, viewers can explore areas within a video, similar to a 3D-rendered video game. "Given the current state of the world, an incoming action, and a history of states and actions, the model attempts to predict the next state of the world," explains Odyssey in a blog post. "Powering this is a new world model, demonstrating capabilities like generating pixels that feel realistic, maintaining spatial consistency, learning actions from video, and outputting coherent video streams for 5 minutes or more." A number of startups and big tech companies are chasing after world models, including DeepMind, influential AI researcher Fei-Fei Lee's World Labs, Microsoft, and Decart. They believe that world models could one day be used to create interactive media, such as games and movies, and run realistic simulations like training environments for robots. But creatives have mixed feelings about the tech. A recent Wired investigation found that game studios like Activision Blizzard, which has laid off scores of workers, are using AI to cut corners and combat attrition. And a 2024 study commissioned by the Animation Guild, a union representing Hollywood animators and cartoonists, estimated that over 100,000 U.S.-based film, television, and animation jobs will be disrupted by AI in the coming months. For its part, Odyssey is pledging to collaborate with creative professionals — not replace them. "Interactive video [...] opens the door to entirely new forms of entertainment, where stories can be generated and explored on demand, free from the constraints and costs of traditional production," writes the company in its blog post. "Over time, we believe everything that is video today — entertainment, ads, education, training, travel, and more — will evolve into interactive video, all powered by Odyssey." Odyssey's demo is a bit rough around the edges, which the company acknowledges in its post. The environments the model generates are blurry and distorted, and unstable in the sense that their layouts don't always remain the same. Walk forward in one direction for a while or turn around, and the surroundings might suddenly look different. But the company's promising to rapidly improve upon the model, which can currently stream video at up to 30 frames per second from clusters of Nvidia H100 GPUs at the cost of $1-$2 per "user-hour." "Looking ahead, we're researching richer world representations that capture dynamics far more faithfully, while increasing temporal stability and persistent state," writes Odyssey in its post. "In parallel, we're expanding the action space from motion to world interaction, learning open actions from large-scale video." Odyssey is taking a different approach than many AI labs in the world modeling space. It designed a 360-degree, backpack-mounted camera system to capture real-world landscapes, which Odyssey thinks can serve as a basis for higher-quality models than models trained solely on publicly available data. To date, Odyssey has raised $27 million from investors including EQT Ventures, GV, and Air Street Capital. Ed Catmull, one of the co-founders of Pixar and former president of Walt Disney Animation Studios, is on the startup's board of directors. Last December, Odyssey said it was working on software that allows creators to load scenes generated by its models into tools such as Unreal Engine, Blender, and Adobe After Effects so that they can be hand-edited. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at Sign in to access your portfolio
