World Models & General Intuition: Khosla's largest bet since LLMs & OpenAI
Dec 6, 2025 · 1:04:51
Pim de Wit, founder of Medal and General Intuition (GI), turned down a reported $500M offer from OpenAI to spin out GI with a $134M seed from Khosla Ventures — Vinod Khosla's largest bet since OpenAI — arguing that world models trained on peak human gameplay are the next frontier after LLMs. Medal's 12M users generate 3.8B action-labeled clips via retroactive recording, creating a privacy-preserving dataset of 'episodic memory for simulation.' GI builds fully vision-based agents that see only frames and output actions in real-time, using pure imitation learning without RL, and can transfer from arcade games to realistic games to real-world video. Pim explains why world models need actions, memory, and partial observability (e.g., smoke, camera shake) compared to video generation, and how they distill giant policies into tiny real-time models that navigate and hide like humans. He recounts his path from running the largest RuneScape private server to reverse engineering, cold-emailing the Diamond (world model) paper authors to assemble a top research team, and advises data founders to train models themselves before selling. GI's near-term customers are game developers replacing…
