A CEO Who Builds Simulated Worlds Says He Is 90 Percent Sure We Live in One

When Oliver Cameron, the chief executive of Odyssey, a startup that builds computer-generated worlds where artificial intelligence can learn, was asked whether our reality is base reality or a simulation, he did not hedge.

"I'm 90 percent certain that this is a simulation, a very advanced simulation of some sort," he said.

His reasoning comes from how his own worlds get built. Asked whether making a virtual Italy would mean simulating tens of millions of people, every shadow under a bridge and every fish in the water, he chose the narrower option.

The better approach, he said, is to focus GPU time on the path of the agent, in his example a fly, and to leave everything outside that uncomputed. He said "we can support something like 20 agents inside a world model session simultaneously," each with a unique viewpoint, then asked "how do you scale that to a billion?"

He suggested our universe might work the same way, supplying full detail only where it is needed. Lon Harris, the co-host questioning him, said he now puts the odds at 50-50, saying he has grown more open now that humans are building simulations and "putting animal brains in them."

Harris added, as a hypothetical, that someone with the technology might put six billion simulated human brains inside just to see what happens.

Cameron pointed to Odyssey's logo, which is inspired by a famous physics test called the double-slit experiment. In the test, light sent through two narrow openings makes one pattern when its passage is measured and a different pattern when it is not, as if watching changes the outcome.

That difference, he said, "might be indicative of some sort of" performance characteristic of the universe. He cautioned that scientists do not fully understand what observation means, asking whether it might simply be particles interacting and what counts as observation.