General Intuition, a New York-based artificial intelligence startup, has closed a $320 million funding round that values it at $2.3 billion, backed by investors including Jeff Bezos, Coatue, Eric Schmidt, and researchers from MIT and Google DeepMind. The company argues that large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude, while strong at text, struggle to grasp how objects move through space and time — a capability it sees as essential for artificial general intelligence — and it is betting that video game data can fill that gap.

The company, which spun out of the gaming platform Medal TV, is led by chief executive Pim de Witte, who appeared on TechCrunch's Equity podcast to discuss its approach. He explained why "world models" trained on gaming data could represent the next leap in physical AI and robotics, and addressed the ethical questions raised by the prospect of such models being used for defence applications.