As soon as I entered General Intuition’s R&D floor in its New York office, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Pim de Witte, 31, directed my attention to a monitor placed on a standing desk. Someone seemed to be playing something like Fortnite. It wasn’t a person.
“Our agent has been playing for 100 hours straight,” said Kent Rollins, the company’s chief product officer.
Before I could become engrossed in the spectacle of an AI navigating the game’s virtual environment, I heard the electronic footsteps of a large quadruped robot approaching.
“The same brain that drives the agent playing the game is driving the robot,” de Witte told me. Josh Duplantis, a data analyst carrying a laptop streaming a live feed from the robot’s single camera, stepped in to explain that the robot’s default mode was “exploration.”
Relying on that camera, its singular eye, the giant insect-like robot approached me, circled around me, and continued towards the office. From time to time he would knock over chair legs or bump into an errant trash can, like a toddler who hasn’t yet learned how his body relates to the world around him. Duplantis said it took just eight minutes of real-world robotics data to fine-tune an AI model for quadrupeds. What’s more, that data was collected on the street, not inside the office where the robot was currently browsing.
An agent model that can be generalized from game to simulation to embodiment is the raison d’être of General Intuition. And that model’s ability to determine its place in the world has secured the support of some heavyweights.
On Thursday, General Intuition said it had raised $320 million at a $2.3 billion valuation, confirming Previous TechCrunch reports. The round brings General Intuition’s total disclosed funding to $454 million, following the Round of 134 million dollars posed at its launch last October.
The startup grew out of De Witte’s other company, Medal, which allows players to upload and share video game clips. The hundreds of millions of hours of gameplay uploaded provided the initial data set to train General Intuition’s model in spatio-temporal reasoning, or understanding how to move through space and time.
But the key ingredient wasn’t the game footage; were the action tags embedded in those clips: records of exactly which buttons a player pressed and when. Most competitors, de Witte says, are trying to infer actions from video alone, which he says is insufficient.
“We consider this to be just the next stage of future pre-training,” de Witte said. “We have a unique model that can respond to Fortnite information on the screen and take action, but also to real-world dynamics in a way that an LLM never could.”
At one point, de Witte provided me with a laptop running General Intuition’s world model, a simulated environment generated frame by frame rather than rendered by a traditional game engine. As I often do when testing world modelsI walked straight towards a series of walls. In other demos I’ve tried, the agents you control sometimes go straight through, but in this one that wasn’t the case. From millions of hours of gaming, he somehow learned that walls are walls, stairs are for climbing, and shadows lengthen as the sun moves.
For general intuition, this world model it is not the product; is the training environment (known internally as “the gym”). Ultimately, the company wants to sell the agent model itself, and so De Witte says the action data embedded in the game helps the model discern the “self” from the “environment” in a way that gives it a richer understanding of causality.
Although General Intuition’s technology appears impressive in demos, the company is not the only one trying to solve this problem. Furthermore, it has not yet been possible to ensure that a model of this type is maintained in the physical world, at scale. Most such approaches require enormous amounts of real-world data that are collected slowly and expensively. General Intuition’s bet is that the game is a scalable shortcut.
Its investors also agree with that bet. General Intuition’s latest round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Nico Rosberg, and researchers from Google DeepMind and MIT.
The vast majority of the round will go toward expanding computing capacity. General Intuition has an agreement with CoreWeave and plans to focus on pre-training the next version of the model. A portion has been set aside to make its API more widely available by the end of summer.
Vinod Khosla, whose company led the round, says he was attracted to De Witte’s vision and the company’s data ownership position.
“If you look at LLMs, when the reasoning came about, it was a quantum leap,” Khosla told me in a phone interview. “In world models, I think the quantum leap is the emergence of intuition in AI, an ability similar to human intuition. The human action and reaction data in games is the key part for the emergence of intuition.”
Vision is a generational enterprise.
General Intuition is not the only company to realize that Medal’s human action data is a key piece of the puzzle of building dynamic world models and general agents. Brianna Martin, the startup’s chief of staff, said the company was born, in part, after Medal rejected an acquisition offer from a major laboratory. Since then there have also been other offers.
De Witte and his co-founders, Eloi Alonso, Adam Jelley and Vincent Micheli, are not interested in being acquired, and the startup’s investors are also not looking for an exit at the moment. The quantity and quality of proprietary data that General Intuition has through Medal is one of the reasons Khosla is convinced the startup is a generational bet, not an M&A target; which could become the backbone of generalized agents and world models in simulation and the real world.
“At this point, it would be a data acquisition, which is uninteresting,” Khosla said.
Part of that also means trusting De Witte’s values.
The businessman spent three years working in the humanitarian field, including with Doctors Without Borders. As such, it has drawn a clear line on how General Intuition’s technology will be used: no agent will be employed to harm humans.
“We don’t want to be a part of the escalating system,” de Witte said. “Let’s say I go out and say, ‘We’re doing lethal autonomy.’ What do you think would happen in other countries?”
That limit on military use cases comes as Silicon Valley is becoming increasingly optimistic about war, although De Witte says he is happy for his models to be used for search and rescue missions.
De Witte is Dutch and much of his team is European, which shapes the company’s identity. He says he brought Martin in part because of his decision to publicly resign from Palantir about his work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“I don’t know why Silicon Valley does what it does,” he said. “There’s a reason I’m not there.”
De Witte’s ethics does not simply limit what models do not do. As a gamer who made $1.5 million building and hosting a private RuneScape server in his teens, de Witte is also thinking about what happens to people left behind by what AI models can do.
General Intuition recently launched a platform called Nerve, a job marketplace that allows players to earn money using their existing setups. Those who sign up start with data labeling and can eventually move on to robot teleoperation and other tasks. Medal’s user base, de Witte noted, is precisely the generation most exposed to AI-powered displacement, and he wants them to have an interest in what comes next.
A data flyer
De Witte wants General Intuition to be an ecosystem enabler, like Anthropic or OpenAI, a model provider that allows others to build on top of its technology. Today, the startup has a handful of clients in the gaming, simulation and robotics sectors.
“We’re not going to build an autonomous vehicle company,” de Witte said. “We’re going to make it 10 times easier for the next person to build an autonomous vehicle company.”
The company says that once it gets its API into the hands of more customers, it will be able to prove itself with a variety of use cases, such as testing a robot in a digital twin of a factory, powering a human-like robot inside a gaming studio, or sending a quadruped to navigate dangerous environments.
While a quadruped is the first physical incarnation General Intuition has tested in the real world, it has also tested drones and other devices, including testing the model in driving games.
“It works with anything you can control using a game controller or a keyboard and mouse,” de Witte said.
The possibility of building a data flywheel is one of the objectives.
“We will choose clients where we can diversify the realizations for which this generalized base model serves as the backbone,” said de Witte. “So we’re going to prioritize selecting clients based on whether they can offer real-world data that will be interesting and useful in driving research. And whether they would have an agile internal team where we can be real integrated partners and learn from each other.”
Khosla said General Intuition’s proprietary data is what has gotten it here, and its ability to continue collecting data that no one else has will be essential. Especially since, despite the impressive demonstrations, whether the transfer from simulation to the real world can be maintained at scale is an open question that no one has fully answered yet.
Correction: The headline previously incorrectly stated how much General Intuition raised in this round. The error has been fixed.
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