General Intuition PBC, a startup developing artificial intelligence models that can navigate three-dimensional environments, has raised $133.7 million in funding.

TechCrunch reported today that Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst led the seed round. Raine Ventures participated as well.

General Intuition was recently spun off from Medal B.V, a venture-backed startup with a popular video sharing app. The software enables users to record and share video game footage. General Intuition will use that footage to train so-called spatial-temporal reasoning models capable of interacting with 3D environments.

The company initially plans to focus on two use cases. The first is building AI features for video games, while the other is powering autonomous search and rescue drones. According to TechCrunch, General Intuition has already developed a model that can understand 3D environments on which it wasn’t specifically trained.

The company’s development roadmap also places an emphasis on building world models. Those are neural networks optimized to generate virtual environments. According to General Intuition, its engineers will use those virtual environments to train spatial-temporal reasoning models.

AI-generated virtual environments currently have certain technical limitations. General Intuition may have to address those limitations as part of its commercialization efforts.

One challenge is that today’s world models can simulate only a limited range of interactions in the environments they generate. Google LLC’s cutting-edge Genie 3 world model, for example, struggles to simulate interactions that involve multiple AI agents.

Simulation consistency is another challenge. During training, an AI model may travel through a certain section of a virtual environment and return to that section a few minutes later. Such interactions can lead to rendering inconsistencies in the simulation.

Spatial-temporal reasoning systems are particularly difficult to implement when they require the ability to follow user instructions. A logistics company, for example, might wish to equip its warehouse robots with the ability to retrieve items requested by workers. Implementing such capabilities requires specialized AI training data and neural network designs.

General Intuition will use the proceeds from its seed round to hire more researchers and engineers. According to TechCrunch, the new hires will speed up the company’s AI development efforts. 

A job posting indicates that General Intuition is also building new training data processing software. According to the listing, the software will ingest thousands of hours of gameplay footage per day from Medal, the company from which General Intuition spun off. One of the project’s goals is to filter erroneous and duplicate training data.

OpenAI reportedly offered to acquire Medal for $500 million last year. Sources told The Information that the ChatGPT developer sought to obtain Medal’s video training datasets, which could potentially help it enhance Sora. In a February 2024 blog post, OpenAI researchers suggested Sora can be used as a world model like those General Intuition is using to train its spatial-temporal algorithms.

World Labs Inc., a competing developer of world models, raised more than $230 million in funding last year from Adobe Inc., Nvidia Corp.’s NVentures and other high-profile backers. The startup reportedly received a valuation of over $1 billion. 

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