Why this CEO thinks video games make better training data than the internet
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- General Intuition closed a $320 million funding round at a $2.3 billion valuation, with Coatue, Eric Schmidt, and researchers from MIT and Google DeepMind joining as investors alongside backer Jeff Bezos.
- Pim de Witte, the New York-based startup's CEO, appeared on TechCrunch's Equity podcast to argue that LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are poorly suited to AGI because they lack grounding in how objects move through space and time.
- General Intuition spun out of gaming platform Medal TV and is training world models on video game data, positioning that approach as the next leap for physical AI.
- De Witte flagged ethical red lines around defense applications of the company's models, a use case the podcast hosts pressed him on.
- Rebecca Bellan co-hosted the Equity episode, which is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, and other podcast platforms.
Why it matters: General Intuition's $2.3 billion valuation on a $320 million raise signals serious investor appetite for an AGI path that bypasses the text-only limits of today's LLMs — a thesis now bankrolled by Coatue, Eric Schmidt, and Google DeepMind researchers, giving the gaming-data approach institutional credibility it didn't have a year ago.
