Key facts
- General Intuition raised $320 million at a $2.3 billion valuation.
- The company's AI agents are trained using data from video games, including player actions.
- The AI models are designed to generalize from gameplay to real-world robotics.
- Funding will be used to scale compute capacity and pre-train future AI models.
- General Intuition has ethical guidelines preventing the use of its AI for harmful military purposes.
General Intuition, an AI company, has raised $320 million at a $2.3 billion valuation to advance its mission of training AI agents using video game data for real-world applications. The company's approach leverages hundreds of millions of hours of gameplay footage, crucially including embedded action labels, to develop models capable of spatial-temporal reasoning and understanding causality.
The startup, spun out of de Witte's other company Medal, which facilitates video game clip sharing, aims to create a scalable shortcut for AI development. CEO Pim de Witte explained that the action data from gameplay allows their models to better distinguish between the 'self' and the 'environment' compared to methods relying solely on video inference.
During a demonstration, an AI agent that had played a game like Fortnite for 100 hours straight was shown to power a quadrupedal robot. This robot, after only eight minutes of real-world data, was able to navigate an office environment, albeit with occasional minor collisions. This showcases the company's goal of creating agentic models that can generalize across gameplay, simulation, and physical embodiment.
The latest funding round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, and researchers from Google DeepMind and MIT. The majority of the funds will be allocated to scaling compute capacity, with plans to pre-train the next version of their model. An API is also slated for broader availability by the end of summer.
Vinod Khosla highlighted the company's proprietary data position and de Witte's vision, suggesting that the human action and reaction data in games is key to developing AI intuition. General Intuition is not interested in acquisition, with investors viewing it as a long-term bet on the future of generalized agents and world models.
De Witte emphasized ethical considerations, stating that the company will not employ its AI for harmful military applications, though it could be used for tasks like search and rescue. The company also launched Nerve, a jobs marketplace for gamers.