Louis Castricato is Co-Founder and CEO of Overworld, a Providence, Rhode Island-based AI startup pioneering real-time diffusion world models for interactive gaming and simulation. He leads product and systems design, pushing the frontier of AI beyond language models into physically coherent, interactive virtual worlds.

Louis studied pure mathematics at the University of Waterloo and pursued doctoral research in RLHF and large language models at Brown University, leaving his PhD program to found Overworld. He also completed graduate coursework at Georgia Tech and a research internship at Hugging Face focused on retrieval-augmented generation.

Louis recognized that LLM research had matured into an applications phase and pivoted toward diffusion world models as the next fundamental AI frontier. His founding insight was restructuring diffusion from a single-output process into a persistent, stateful system capable of continuous real-time world updates responsive to user input.

Prior to Overworld, Louis served as LLM Lead and Research Director at Stability AI, co-founded CarperAI to orchestrate one of the largest open-source RLHF efforts, and conducted interpretability research at EleutherAI alongside leading AI safety researchers. He brings nearly a decade of hands-on RLHF and RLAIF systems experience across research and production environments.

Overworld raised a $4.5M pre-seed round led by Kindred Ventures and released Waypoint-1 in January 2026, a real-time interactive video diffusion model trained on 10,000 hours of game footage running at 30 to 60 FPS on consumer hardware. The company's Waypoint-1.5 model expanded access to Mac and Windows users, delivering real-time AI environments at up to 720p and 60 FPS on everyday consumer GPUs.