General Intuition bets $2.3B on video games to train AI agents for real world

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As I entered General Intuition's R&D floor in New York, co-founder and CEO Pim de Witte drew my attention to a monitor on a standing desk. Someone appeared to be playing Fortnite, but it wasn't a person. "Our agent has been playing for 100 hours straight," Kent Rollins, the company's chief product officer, said.

Before I could focus on the AI navigating the virtual environment, I heard the electronic footsteps of a large quadrupedal robot approaching. "The same brain powering the agent playing the game is powering the robot," de Witte said. Josh Duplantis, a data analyst, explained that the bot's default mode was "exploration." The robot walked up to me, circled around, and continued into the office, occasionally clipping chair legs or bumping into a trash bin.

Duplantis said it took just eight minutes of real-world robotics data to fine-tune an AI model for the quadruped. An agentic model that can generalize from gameplay to simulation to embodiment is General Intuition's core focus. This model's ability to figure out its place in the world has secured backing from heavy hitters.

On Thursday, General Intuition announced it raised $320 million at a $2.3 billion valuation. The round brings General Intuition's total disclosed funding to $454 million, after a $134 million round 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. The key ingredient wasn't the gameplay footage; it was the action labels embedded in those clips. Most competitors are trying to infer actions from video alone, which de Witte 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." De Witte set me up with a laptop running General Intuition's world model, a simulated environment generated frame-by-frame. I walked straight into a series of walls, but this model didn't let the agent pass through.

For General Intuition, this world model is the training environment, not the product. The company ultimately wants to sell the agentic model itself. Impressive though General Intuition's technology appears in demos, the company isn't the only one trying to crack this problem.

Getting such a model to hold up in the physical world, at scale, hasn't yet been done. General Intuition's bet is that gameplay is a scalable shortcut. Its investors are okay with that bet, too.