Decart’s new world model can simulate hours of photorealistic driving — with some caveats
AI startup Decart on Wednesday unveiled Oasis 3, its latest interactive world model that can generate photorealistic driving environments in real time, TechCrunch has exclusively
AI startup Decart on Wednesday unveiled Oasis 3, its latest interactive world model that can generate photorealistic driving environments in real time, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The model is currently available via API. The startup is initially targeting autonomous vehicle companies that need to simulate rare driving scenarios at scale, and plans to expand into robotics and other physical AI applications. But the bigger bet is on developers: By offering API access from day one, Decart is trying to build a developer ecosystem around world models much like how OpenAI did with language models. “It’s going to be the first usable world model that people can actually program on top of,” Dean Leitersdorf, co-founder and CEO of Decart, told TechCrunch. “I think there’s going to be an entire developer community that emerges on top of this.” The startup already has a community of more than 100,000 developers, many of whom are building products on top of its real-time video model Lucy, largely in e-commerce and live streaming. Oasis 3 is based on that foundation model, and it represents the company’s push into physical AI. Access is priced at $0.02 per second, and enterprise pricing depends on use cases, Decart said. Decart is playing in an increasingly packed world model arena. Last year, Google released Genie 3 in research preview, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs launched Marble for commercial use cases, and video generation startups like Luma and Runway are also translating their physics-aware video models into world models. Decart’s Oasis 3 generates photorealistic driving scenarios that you can interact with in real time. Image Credits:Decart Oasis 3’s release comes a few weeks after two-year-old Decart raised $300 million, which Leitersdorf says followed “huge demand increases for the models we built” in e-commerce, live streaming and physical AI.
The round boosted Decart’s valuation to nearly $4 billion, and brought a series of strategic investors such as Toyota, Adobe and eBay. All of these companies are potential customers, says Leitersdorf. Nvidia, an existing investor, also participated in the round. Oasis 3’s edge lies in the photo-realism of its models and infinite generation capability. That’s due to some efficiency wizardry on Decart’s part, powered by the company’s other main product: the DOS (Decart Optimization Stack) software that allows models to run efficiently on Nvidia, Amazon and Google hardware, making its models far less expensive to run than competitors. “This is built on top of our entire real-time stack, which we optimize all the way down to the hardware,” Leitersdorf said. “By being so vertically integrated, we’re able to be more than an order of magnitude cheaper than anyone else in the industry in order to run these models.” The startup’s models are so efficient, per Leitersdorf, that it has burned through “drastically less” than $100 million in its lifetime. Oasis 3 generates physically accurate, multi-camera environments — one front-facing and two-side facing — for training and testing systems. And instead of offering limited demos and research previews, Decart allows developers to generate scenarios infinitely, which is perfect for autonomous vehicle developers looking to try as many edge cases as possible. Compared to other models I’ve tried, like Google’s Genie 3 or World Labs’s Marble, Oasis 3 delivers the most photorealistic environments from a single text prompt I’ve seen. And the fact that you can interact with them for hours suggests a level of efficiency that Decart’s rivals might lack. But by letting you generate a world for so long, the model also degrades significantly.
The BriefWire