General Intuition's $2.3B bet that video games can train AI agents for the real world
General Intuition has raised $320 million to scale AI trained on millions of hours of gameplay, betting action data can help AI develop something closer to human intuition. As soon as I entered General Intuition's R&D floor at its New York office, the company's 31-year-old co-founder and CEO Pim de Witte directed my attention to a monitor perched on a standing desk. Someone appeared to be playing something like Fortnite.
Key Takeaways
- "Our agent has been playing for 100 hours straight," Kent Rollins, the company's chief product officer, said, beaming.
Before I could get absorbed in the spectacle of an AI navigating the game's virtual environment, I heard the electronic footsteps of a large quadrupedal robot approaching.
- Duplantis said it took just eight minutes of real-world robotics data to fine-tune an AI model for the quadruped.
What's more, that data was collected on the street, not inside the office where the bot was currently navigating itself.
- 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.
- " 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.
As I often do when testing world models , I walked straight into a series of walls.
- Moreover, getting such a model to hold up in the physical world, at scale, hasn't yet been done.
Stats & Key Facts
- #General Intuition has raised $320 million to scale AI trained on millions of hours of gameplay, betting action data can help AI develop something closer to human intuition.
- #General Intuition has raised $320 million to scale AI trained on millions of hours of gameplay, betting action data can help AI develop something closer to human intuition.
- #On Thursday, General Intuition said it raised $320 million at a $2.
- #3 billion valuation, confirming TechCrunch's previous reporting .
"Our agent has been playing for 100 hours straight," Kent Rollins, the company's chief product officer, said, beaming. Before I could get absorbed in the spectacle of an AI navigating the game's 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 told me.
Josh Duplantis, a data analyst carrying a laptop streaming a live feed from the robot's single camera, piped up to explain that the bot's default mode was "exploration. " Relying on that camera, its singular eye, the giant buglike bot walked up to me, circled around me, and continued into the office. It occasionally clipped the legs of chairs or bumped into an errant trash bin, much like a toddler who hasn't yet learned how her body relates to the world around it.
Duplantis said it took just eight minutes of real-world robotics data to fine-tune an AI model for the quadruped. What's more, that data was collected on the street, not inside the office where the bot was currently navigating itself. An agentic model that can generalize from gameplay to simulation to embodiment is General Intuition's raison d'être.
For more details please read the original article at TechCrunch AI.
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