General Intuition talks to raise $300M at about a $2B valuation

In short: General Intuition is in talks to raise about $300 million, which would value the company at a little over $2 billion.

What happened

General Intuition is a New York based AI startup. Sources told TechCrunch the company is discussing a new funding round of around $300 million.

If the deal happens, those sources say it would put General Intuition’s valuation at just over $2 billion. A valuation is the price investors use to estimate what a company is worth.

TechCrunch reports the backers in the round could include Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt, along with existing investors like Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst. The company was formed about eight months ago as a spin out from Medal, a platform where people upload and share video game clips.

General Intuition’s focus is “AI agents,” meaning AI systems that can take actions to complete tasks, more like a helper than a simple chatbot. It is training these agents to understand space and time, like how objects move and what might happen next.

To do that, it uses Medal’s data, which the company says includes about 2 billion videos per year from 10 million monthly active users. The idea is that first person gameplay is like a practice world for AI, similar to how flight simulators help train pilots.

A source told TechCrunch the new money would be used to buy more computing power and to release a new product by late summer or early fall.

Why it matters

A lot of today’s AI is strongest with words and images, but weaker at understanding how the physical world works. If General Intuition succeeds, it could help build AI that is better at tasks involving movement and timing, which could matter for robots and other real world systems.

Source: TechCrunch AI