World model startup General Intuition closes $220M investment

General Intuition Inc. has secured $220 million in funding at a $6.2 billion valuation, according to a recent announcement. The investment was led by Valor Equity Partners, Atreides, Seven Seven Six, Point72, Khosla Ventures, and General Catalyst. This capital injection comes a year after General Intuition spun out of video sharing platform Medal B.V.

Medal offers a free tool that allows users to record and capture video game footage. General Intuition leverages this footage to train its artificial intelligence models. The process of creating AI models involves providing them with examples of the tasks they will perform. For instance, an algorithm powering a robotic arm might be provided with footage of robotic arms welding car parts.

Manually recording such footage can be a time-intensive task. General Intuition's mission is to simplify this process by developing world models that can generate synthetic footage for AI training purposes. The company recently unveiled its latest algorithm, MIRA, in June. MIRA surpasses previous models in several key areas. Unlike traditional video generators, MIRA can create videos that run indefinitely without diverging.

Additionally, MIRA can render intricate scenes involving multiple rapidly moving objects interacting with each other, making it particularly useful for training robots to avoid collisions. The efficiency of MIRA stems from its use of latent diffusion, a technique that involves running calculations on a compressed representation of video frames known as a latent space.

This approach allows for reduced memory usage and faster processing times. MIRA's 5.6 billion parameters are significantly fewer than those found in frontier models, contributing to its efficiency. Currently, MIRA can only generate synthetic footage of a single video game. However, the company believes its efficiency and rendering quality position MIRA as a key "stepping stone to physical AI."

General Intuition is testing a commercial version of its technology with a select group of customers working on robotics, simulation, and entertainment projects. The company opened a waitlist for interested parties during today's funding announcement. With the new capital, General Intuition plans to hire more AI researchers to further enhance its technology.