Gaming Videos Power a New AI Frontier: Medal Spins Out General Intuition

Medal, the popular platform for sharing video game clips, is taking its massive gaming library into the AI world new spinout, General Intuition, is training AI agents to understand how objects and entities move through space and time.

Medal’s dataset is staggering 2 billion videos a year from 10 million monthly users across tens of thousands of games. CEO Pim de Witte explains that gamers’ clips often highlight extreme successes or failures – perfect “edge cases” for training AI. “You get a selection bias toward exactly the kind of data you want,” he says.

This unique dataset even caught the eye of OpenAI, which reportedly tried to acquire Medal for $500 million late last year. Instead, General Intuition has raised $133.7 million in seed funding from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, and Raine to scale its team and technology.

The startup’s AI agents already impress: they can navigate and predict actions in unfamiliar environments using only visual input, just like a human player would. This ability could transfer naturally to real-world systems like drones, robotic arms, and autonomous vehicles, which often mimic game controller inputs.

Unlike other companies selling world models for content creation, General Intuition focuses on creating smarter bots and NPCs that adapt to player skill, keeping games challenging, engaging, and fair. And the applications go beyond gaming: search-and-rescue drones could navigate tricky environments without GPS, a project inspired by de Witte’s humanitarian work.

The team sees spatial-temporal reasoning as crucial for true artificial general intelligence (AGI). “Text alone loses vital information,” says de Witte. “To build AI that truly understands the world, you need intuition about space, movement, and time.”