This startup thinks robotics is about to have its ChatGPT moment

General Intuition, a startup led by CEO Pim de Witte, argues that robotics is about to undergo a revolution akin to the one OpenAI's models triggered in artificial intelligence. The company has built a foundation model for physical AI, trained on millions of hours of video game data, including information about which buttons a human pressed and when.

Last month, General Intuition raised $320 million at a $2.3 billion valuation. Investors were convinced by the thesis that building effective robot models doesn't require massive real-world datasets, but rather high-quality data that allows the model to transfer intuition about movement and interaction across different environments.

In an interview with TechCrunch, de Witte noted that many companies are currently doing specialized work for individual robots and environments, which will soon become redundant as general models emerge. He emphasized that the generalization of the model itself is the product. General Intuition's model can play a video game for hours and, after fine-tuning on just eight minutes of real-world robotics data, power a quadrupedal robot.

General Intuition does not plan to build robots itself but aims to become the foundation model for other robotics companies. As de Witte put it: "We're not gonna build a self-driving car company. We're gonna make it 10 times easier for the next person to build a self-driving car company."