General Intuition’s $2.3B bet that video games can train AI agents for the real world
On Thursday, General Intuition said it raised 2.3 billion valuation, confirming TechCrunch’s previous reporting. The round brings General Intuition’s total disclosed funding to 134 million round it raised at launch last October.
The startup was spun out of de Witte’s other company, Medal, which allows gamers to upload and share video game clips. The hundreds of millions of hours of uploaded gameplay provided the initial dataset to train General Intuition’s model in spatial-temporal reasoning — or understanding how to move through space and time.
But the key ingredient wasn’t the gameplay footage; it was the action labels embedded in those clips: records of exactly what buttons a player pressed and when. Most competitors, de Witte says, are trying to infer actions from video alone, which he argues is insufficient.
“We view this as just the next stage of future pre-training,” de Witte said. “We have a single 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 could never.”
At one point, de Witte set me up with a laptop running General Intuition’s world model, a simulated environment generated frame-by-frame rather than rendered by a traditional game engine. From the millions of hours of gameplay, it somehow learned that walls are walls, ladders are for scaling, and shadows lengthen as the sun moves.
For General Intuition, this world model isn’t the product; it’s the training environment (referred to as “the gym” internally). The company ultimately wants to sell the agentic model itself, and de Witte argues that the action data embedded in gameplay helps the model discern the “self” from the “environment” in a way that gives it a richer understanding of causality.
An agentic model that can generalize from gameplay to simulation to embodiment is General Intuition’s raison d’être. The same brain powering an agent playing Fortnite for 100 hours straight also powers a quadrupedal robot navigating an office — fine-tuned with just eight minutes of real-world robotics data collected on the street.
General Intuition’s latest round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Nico Rosberg, and researchers at Google DeepMind and MIT.
The vast majority of the round will go toward scaling compute capacity. General Intuition has a deal with CoreWeave and plans to focus on pre-training the next version of the model. A slice has been earmarked for making its API more broadly available by the end of summer.
Vinod Khosla, whose firm led the round, says he was drawn to de Witte’s vision and the company’s proprietary data position.
“If you look at LLMs, when reasoning emerged, 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 the AI, a human intuition-like capability. The human action data and reaction data you have in games is the key part to the emergence of intuition.”
General Intuition isn’t the only company to notice that Medal’s human action data is a key piece of the puzzle of building dynamic world models and general agents. The company was born, in part, after Medal turned down an acquisition offer from a major lab.
De Witte and his co-founders, Eloi Alonso, Adam Jelley, and Vincent Micheli, aren’t interested in being acquired. De Witte has drawn a clear line for how General Intuition’s tech will be used: No agents will be employed to harm humans.
General Intuition recently launched a platform called Nerve, a jobs marketplace that lets gamers earn money using their existing setups. Those who sign up start with data labeling and can eventually move toward robot teleoperation and other tasks.
De Witte wants General Intuition to be an ecosystem enabler, like Anthropic or OpenAI — a model provider that enables others to build on top of its technology. Today, the startup has a handful of customers in gaming, simulation, and robotics.
“It works on anything that you can control using a game controller or a keyboard mouse,” de Witte said.
Whether the simulation-to-real-world transfer can hold at scale is an open question that nobody has fully answered yet.