General Intuition in talks to raise $300M at around $2B valuation

Ah, another day, another startup claiming it can brute-force intelligence by feeding a neural network a few thousand hours of screen recordings. General Intuition is in talks to raise $300 million at a $2 billion valuation — for a foundation model trained on gameplay data. Because nothing says 'real-world understanding' like a model that has spent more time jumping on Goombas than navigating an actual pavement.

The pitch: they're building 'world models' for embodied AI. In plain English, that means they want robots to learn how the world works by watching someone digital sprint through *Mario Kart*. And investors are apparently fine with this — a $2 billion price tag for a company whose product might one day... exist. The fact that this is still 'in talks' rather than closed suggests even the VCs are pausing to ask whether their money is just buying a glorified video game emulator.

But sure, let's hand over physical-world decision-making to a system whose primary training data is people committing virtual traffic violations and farming ore for thirty hours straight. What could possibly go wrong? The real world, mercifully, doesn't come with a reset button — though if it did, I imagine the investors would be first in line to press it.