This AI Was Trained on a Billion Video Game Clips. Now It Controls Robots.

**Pim de Witte** (0:00)
On RuneScape, I built the largest private server in the world, so that's the only one where, measurably, I think did pretty well.

**Eric Newcomer** (0:05)
Is there money in that?

**Pim de Witte** (0:06)
Yeah, the company generated about a million and a half a year in revenue by the time I was 18 years old.

**Eric Newcomer** (0:11)
You're saying there are more car crashes in the video games than in the real world?

**Pim de Witte** (0:14)
We've counted. The amount of clips uploaded with car crash labels surpasses the amount of physical car crashes that happen in the United States every day.

**Eric Newcomer** (0:21)
Are there games you're prioritizing to show off your capabilities?

**Pim de Witte** (0:25)
I think we'll leave a bit of a surprise.

**Eric Newcomer** (0:27)
At 18, Pim de Witte was running the biggest RuneScape private server in the world. Today, he runs Metal, the app gamers use to clip their best moments. They upload about a billion clips a year, and every clip records the exact buttons the player pressed. That's what his nude company, General Intuition, trains AI on. The result is a model that reads a screen and works out what to do next. And that skill transfers straight to robots. Pim says his AI already beats him at almost every video game. Almost, not Rocket League. This is my conversation with Pim de Witte, CEO of General Intuition.
Pim de Witte, CEO of General Intuition. Thank you so much for joining the Newcomer Podcast.

**Pim de Witte** (1:15)
Thank you for having me.

**Eric Newcomer** (1:16)
We have so much to talk about. We'll get into some of the big questions of artificial intelligence progress you're building and what might be, you know, one of the buzziest categories in Silicon Valley right now, world models.
But I thought I'd start off in more fun, light-hearted territory. You were at the top of your field in RuneScape and Rocket League, I believe. And they sort of helped you get into entrepreneurship, right? So, yeah, tell us about your RuneScape days. And are they all behind you?

**Pim de Witte** (1:49)
Yeah.
RuneScape, no, I still play both games occasionally, actually. So I got so good at Rocket League that I can kind of tell how my mental state is by how I play and whether I should be making important decisions that day. So if I'm on it and sharp, I can see that I'm playing really well. I can essentially measure my level of decision making by, like, if I play a few games in the morning, I kind of know whether or not it's a good day to make big decisions.

**Eric Newcomer** (2:17)
And do you do that? You're like, I'm on a board meeting today, let's play some Rocket League and see if I'm at my best.

**Pim de Witte** (2:23)
Admittedly, recently, no.
But I think in the past year, I probably get 10% of the games in before I started the company. But I know on RuneScape, I built the largest private server. So in Rocket League, I got up to GC1, so definitely not the top of the field, but it's a good place to be.

**Eric Newcomer** (2:45)
You know what top percent is?

**Pim de Witte** (2:47)
I don't know.
If I guess, so it's double, so I'm guessing top 5% or something like that. I don't know what the today's numbers are. On RuneScape, I built the largest private server in the world, so that's the only one where measurably, I think, did pretty well.

**Eric Newcomer** (3:00)
Is there money in that?

**Pim de Witte** (3:01)
Yeah, yeah. Company generated about a million and a half a year in revenue by the time I was 18 years old.
And we owned about 60% of the private server market on RuneScape. Yeah.

**Eric Newcomer** (3:13)
Is that still running?

**Pim de Witte** (3:14)
No, shut it down when the company behind RuneScape got sold, I believe, in 2015 It got sold to a Chinese mining company at some point.

**Eric Newcomer** (3:24)
Like physical mining or crypto mining?

**Pim de Witte** (3:26)
Yeah, physical mining. Yeah, there was some program at the time where the government was encouraging non-technical companies to go buy overseas technical companies. And I believe they somehow ended up buying the careers of RuneScape. And then, yeah, as a result, we had to shut our servers down.

**Eric Newcomer** (3:42)
Because they made everything private or?

**Pim de Witte** (3:45)
Yeah, I think they were more strict on private servers than the previous ownership.

**Eric Newcomer** (3:49)
Did you, you know, were you one of these people like harvesting in-game items and selling them to?