The Gamer Who Said No to OpenAI

In October 2025, the reason became clear. De Witte launched General Intuition, a new AI lab that raised $133.7 million in seed funding from Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst. [2] It is one of the largest seed rounds ever in gaming and AI. The thesis: to understand the future of artificial intelligence, one must stop with text and start with video.

The difference between describing and understanding

Large language models can describe the world, but they do not understand it. At least, that is De Witte's belief. "When people create text to describe the world, a lot of information is lost," he told TechCrunch. "You lose the intuition about how things move and interact in space and time." [3]

The solution lies in so-called world models: AI systems that predict not just words but can simulate physical reality. In 2024, Google DeepMind demonstrated with Genie 2 how such a model can generate a playable 3D world from a single image. [4] The bottleneck? Training data. Qualitative video of people performing complex spatial tasks is scarce and expensive to collect.

Medal.tv offers just that. Ten million monthly active users upload two billion clips annually from tens of thousands of different games. [5] But the interesting part is not the quantity. Gamers do not share random moments. They upload their best performances and their most spectacular failures. This selection bias, normally a problem in data science, becomes an advantage here. Edge cases are exactly what you need to make AI robust.

The silent strategy

Notable is what General Intuition does not do. While DeepMind and World Labs sell their world models as products for AI training and content creation, De Witte keeps his models for internal use. [6] The commercial focus is on NPCs and bots that dynamically adapt to the player's level.

This choice is strategically smart. By not competing with game developers, the company avoids the legal minefields surrounding copyright that plague other AI companies. The lawsuit against Stability AI is ongoing, with a court hearing scheduled for September 2026. [7]

"Our aim is not to build models that compete with game developers," said De Witte. [3] The first products are expected in the first half of 2026.

Beyond gaming

The ambitions reach beyond entertainment. De Witte previously worked at Doctors Without Borders, where he co-developed MapSwipe, an app that helps volunteers analyze satellite images for humanitarian purposes. [8] This background now inspires a second area of application: search-and-rescue drones that can navigate unfamiliar terrain without GPS.

The underlying idea is that spatial reasoning is a crucial ingredient for artificial general intelligence that language models fundamentally miss. Most AI labs scale their language models ever larger. General Intuition is betting on a different modality.

Whether that gamble pays off is uncertain. World models are young enough that the race is still open. According to Hartmann Capital, total funding in the sector was $315 million in Q4 2024 alone. [9] Decart recently reached a valuation of $3.1 billion, World Labs raised $230 million at a valuation of over a billion. [10]

The stakes

The question underlying this story is more fundamental than which company wins. It's about whether the next breakthrough in AI will come from language or from imagery, from description or from simulation. De Witte has made his choice. With two billion video clips per year and investors willing to put up half a billion to join the cause, he certainly has the resources to test his thesis.

First products in 2026. Then we'll know more.