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. It wasn’t a person.
“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 bug-like 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 that 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’etre. And that model’s ability to figure out its place in the world has secured the backing of some heavy hitters.
On Thursday, General Intuition said it raised $320 milli …