Self-Driving Cars - Global Speakers Bureau

Oliver is the co-founder and CEO of Odyssey. Odyssey is an AI lab pioneering general-purpose world models: causal, multimodal systems that learn to predict and interact with the world over long horizons. This foundational technology promises to revolutionize robotics, science, healthcare, education, gaming, defense, and beyond.

Odyssey was founded in late 2023 by Oliver Cameron (Cruise VP, Voyage CEO, Y Combinator alum) and Jeff Hawke (Wayve VP, Oxford AI PhD), with deep roots in experts in world models, autonomous systems, RL, and frontier AI. They’ve since recruited a world-class research team from DeepMind, Tesla, Waymo, Meta, Apple, and Wayve.

Odyssey has raised significant venture capital from GV and EQT, with additional backing from NVIDIA, Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, Guillermo Rauch, Garry Tan, Kyle Vogt, and researchers at OpenAI, DeepMind, and Midjourney.

Prior to Odyssey, Oliver spent 8 years building and scaling fully driverless cars. Oliver served as VP of Product at Cruise—a leader in self-driving cars—after the acquisition of his own autonomous driving startup, Voyage. At Cruise, Oliver focused on AI, products, tooling, and services to scale the fleet, AV driving behaviors, next-generation vehicles, and more. He led the launch of the world’s first fully driverless service in San Francisco, and scaled it to 3 major US cities, generating substantial revenue and over 100,000 5-star ratings from customers.

Before being acquired by Cruise, Oliver was co-founder and CEO of Voyage, a 70-person startup that developed and deployed state-of-the-art self-driving cars. In March 2021, Cruise acquired Voyage to supercharge their technology efforts.

Prior to Voyage, Oliver was the VP of Product & Engineering at the online education startup Udacity. Oliver worked closely with AI pioneer Sebastian Thrun to deliver world-class online education to millions of people. At Udacity, Oliver led a 200-strong research, product, engineering, and content team, launching and growing online classes in AI, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and more.

Brad Templeton is a developer of and commentator on self-driving cars, software architect, board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, internet entrepreneur, futurist lecturer, writer and observer of cyberspace issues, hobby photographer, and an artist. Templeton has been a consultant on Google’s team designing a driverless car and lectures and blogs about the emerging technology of automated transportation. He is also noted as a speaker and writer covering copyright law and political and social issues related to computing and networks. He is a director of the futurist Foresight Nanotech Institute, a think tank and public interest organization focused on transformative future technologies.
Templeton was founder, publisher and software architect at ClariNet Communications Corp., which in the 1990s became the first internet-based business, creating an electronic newspaper. He has been active in the computer network community since 1979, participated in the building and growth of USENET from its earliest days, and in 1987 founded and edited a special USENET conference devoted to comedy.
Templeton has been involved in the development of important pieces of software including VisiCalc, the world’s first computer spreadsheet, and Stuffit for archiving and compressing computer files. In 1996, ClariNet joined the ACLU and others in opposing the Communications Decency Act, part of the Telecom bill passed during Clinton Administration. The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the plaintiffs and ruled that the Act violated the First Amendment in seeking to impose anti-indecency standards on the internet.
Professional Activities: - Founder of ClariNet, the world’s first internet-based business (first dot-com) - Director and chairman for 10 years of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organization created to “confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today.” - Developer of many packaged software products in the microcomputer era. - Published first large e-book anthology of current fiction. - Leader of internet/USENET community, creating rec.humor.funny which was the most widely read publication on the internet from 1988 to 1995.