General Intuition, the New York startup building a foundational model that trains artificial intelligence agents how to navigate space and time, is in talks to raise about $300 million, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The raise comes eight months after General Intuition exited Medal, a platform for uploading and sharing video game clips, for $134 million. The new funds would raise the startup’s valuation to just over $2 billion, sources say.
Sources say TechCrunch General Intuition has secured capital from backers including Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt, as well as existing investors Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst.
Pim de Witte, who co-founded Medal, founded and leads General Intuition with co-founders Eloi Alonso, Adam Jelley and Vincent Micheli — researchers who bring expertise in global modeling and simulation.
The startup trains embedded AI models and globally using Medal’s dataset of 2 billion videos per year from 10 million monthly active users. The startup’s pitch is that such a dataset — unique because it allows AI to learn from interactive first-person gameplay — is the perfect basis for teaching machines deep spatiotemporal logic, allowing them to perceive, predict and interact in real-time in simulation.
This data set has reportedly attracted the attention of OpenAI, which previously tried to acquire Medal. And the sources say OpenAI wasn’t the only big AI lab taking a hit.
The global model space in which General Intuition plays is heating up. Startups like Runway, Decart, and World Labs have recently released global models, and Google’s Genie 3 recently began incorporating Google Maps data for more real-world simulation capabilities.
All of these companies see gaming and robotics training as near-term commercial use cases, but General Intuition takes a different approach: It builds global models to train agents, not to sell them. Agents are the product, and the startup’s unique data set gives it a path to viability.
General Intuition will use the funds to scale its computing capacity so it can launch a new product by late summer or early fall, according to a source familiar with the matter.
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