{"id":221596,"date":"2025-10-18T01:47:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T01:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/221596\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T01:47:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T01:47:10","slug":"why-world-models-are-the-next-big-thing-in-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/221596\/","title":{"rendered":"Why world models are the next big thing in AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath<\/a>, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.<\/p>\n

Around the middle of last year, Pim de Witte started reaching out to a handful of prominent AI labs to see if they\u2019d be interested in using data from Medal<\/a>, his popular video game clipping platform, to train their agents.<\/p>\n

Within weeks, it became clear that Medal\u2019s data was more valuable to the labs than he expected. \u201cWe received multiple acquisition offers very quickly,\u201d he told me. (He declined to name names, but it has been reported<\/a> that OpenAI offered $500 million.) \u201cInitially, we were quite interested in them,\u201d he said of the offers, but that \u201cwas mostly a result of us not understanding what we were sitting on.\u201d<\/p>\n

He had read the Google DeepMind research paper<\/a> showing that gaming data can be used to teach AI how to navigate a 3D environment. However, the interest from AI labs made him realize that his data from Medal, which receives roughly 2 billion video uploads per year from tens of thousands of video games, could be used to develop a unique foundational model for extending AI to the real world.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a pretty big bet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, Pim de Witte announced that Medal is spinning out a new AI lab called General Intuition that has raised a $133.7 million seed round. The money for the round is primarily from Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and one of the first investors in OpenAI. Other investors include General Catalyst and the Raine Group. Moritz Baier-Lentz, who oversees Lightspeed\u2019s gaming investments, is also joining the startup part-time as a founding team member.<\/p>\n

Khosla believes that General Intuition could be as impactful in the field of AI agents as OpenAI was on how people use large language models. It\u2019s his firm\u2019s largest seed check since it backed OpenAI in 2018. \u201cIt\u2019s a pretty big bet,\u201d he told me. \u201cThey have a unique dataset and a unique team.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unless you\u2019re steeped in the AI world, you probably haven\u2019t heard much about world models yet. It\u2019s a branch of research that trains AI to have spatial understanding like a human. The idea is that a robot could, for example, predict when a glass of water will spill when knocked off a table and grab it before it falls. More practically, AI researchers are increasingly looking to world models as a way to train agents that can reliably generate and interact with a 3D space.<\/p>\n

Among the prominent AI leaders, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has been the most vocal advocate for world models and their importance in achieving AGI. Google recently demoed Genie 3<\/a>, a model that generates a video game-like environment from scratch as you navigate through it. There are also a handful of startups working on similar models, including Fei-Fei Li\u2019s World Labs, which this week released its own demo<\/a> of a model that generates interactive video in real-time.<\/p>\n

For General Intuition, the goal is to control any kind of device that can be mapped to a keyboard and mouse or has a game controller-like input scheme, according to de Witte. He expects the startup\u2019s first model to be used by search and rescue drones but sees the potential for applications in other areas, including humanoid robots and self-driving cars.<\/p>\n

Just as LLMs were initially trained on internet text data, de Witte believes that gaming environments will unlock AI\u2019s ability to reliably predict the proper action to take in the physical world. \u201cGames are basically the only verifiable domain for spatial-temporal reasoning,\u201d he explained. \u201cYou can separate a good action from a bad action, which is why it\u2019s so valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, it\u2019s a risky bet. The correct technical path for developing world models is hotly debated in the AI industry, and as even Khosla noted to me, it\u2019s unclear what data will ultimately prove the most valuable. Members of de Witte\u2019s early research team have published<\/a> notable research<\/a> in the field, but the startup is still competing with better-funded giants like Google. \u201cSomebody will win big in this market,\u201d said Khosla, who told me thinks it\u2019s an area where \u201cmultiple hundred-billion-dollar and potentially even trillion-dollar companies will be built.\u201d<\/p>\n

De Witte predicts that gaming companies will become prime takeover targets for AI labs as interest in world models heats up. His decision to start General Intuition was driven by the realization that, thanks to Medal\u2019s data, he\u2019s in the unique position to be more than a data supplier. However, he warned me that others might find it challenging to resist licensing checks and acquisition offers from the big AI labs.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou are at an information disadvantage,\u201d he said when I asked if he had advice for the gaming industry. \u201cThe better these models get, the less data they\u2019re likely going to need.\u201d<\/p>\n

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