From Fortnite to robots: General Intuition raises $2.3B on bet that video games can train AI agents for the real world
As soon as I entered General Intuition’s R&D floor at its New York office, the company’s 31-year-old co-founder and CEO Pim de Witte directed my attention to a monitor perched on a standing desk. Someone appeared to be playing Fortnite. It wasn’t a person.
“Our agent has been playing for 100 hours straight,” Kent Rollins, the company’s chief product officer, said, beaming.
Before I could get absorbed in the spectacle of an AI navigating the game’s virtual environment, I heard the electronic footsteps of a large quadrupedal robot approaching.
“The same brain powering the agent playing Fortnite is powering the robot,” de Witte told me. Josh Duplantis, a data analyst carrying a laptop streaming a live feed from the robot’s single camera, piped up to explain that the bot’s default mode was “exploration.”
Relying on that camera, its singular eye, the giant bug-like bot walked up to me, circled around...
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