Here's a strange one from last month that's still worth talking about. General Intuition, a startup most gamers have never heard of, pulled in $320 million at a $2.3 billion valuation. Jeff Bezos put his own money in. So did Eric Schmidt. The company's total funding is now sitting north of $450 million, and it's only been around since October.
What does General Intuition actually make? Not a game. Not a game engine. It trains AI models using footage of people playing games.
The Medal Connection
General Intuition spun out of Medal, the clip-sharing platform gamers use to save and share their best plays. Medal has north of 10 million monthly users, and every one of those saved clips comes bundled with something most video doesn't have: the exact inputs behind it. Which buttons got pressed, when, and what happened on screen a moment later.
That pairing is the whole pitch. CEO Pim de Witte's argument is that this kind of data teaches an AI model something text can't: how actions in space lead to consequences over time. A robot arm reaching for a cup and a player dodging a grenade are, in this framing, doing a version of the same thing.
Not Really About Games
Despite the source material, this company isn't trying to build a better version of Roblox's AI tools. The money is going toward scaling compute through a partnership with CoreWeave, and the eventual goal is models that can operate in physical environments as much as virtual ones — robotics, self-driving, anything that requires understanding cause and effect in real time. Games just happen to be an incredibly cheap, plentiful source of exactly that kind of data.
De Witte has said publicly he doesn't want the company to put anyone out of a job. Make of that what you will, given who's cutting the checks here.
Why It's Worth Knowing About
None of this changes what's happening on your phone or console tonight. But it's a sign of where a chunk of the AI investment world is looking for its next big dataset, and it turns out the answer was sitting in millions of people's clip folders the whole time. A commercial API is planned for later this summer, so this is one to keep an eye on rather than file away.
