James Swingos

COO at Medal / General Intuition.
Work with us:

[General Catalyst @generalcatalyst]

“The digital world lacks physical information. The physical world lacks dense digital information. Games perfectly merge these two together, and we believe that’s just the next phase of pretraining.”

Every few weeks @gen_intuition ships new emergent capabilities that are orthogonal to anything you see in the LLM world.

Watch GC’s @max_rimpel in conversation with @PimDeWitte.

Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
00:10 — The World's Biggest Private RuneScape Server
03:09 — From RuneScape to Ebola
07:41 — Mapping the Unmappable
09:47 — Why LLMs Can't See the World
13:45 — The Accidental Foundation of General Intuition
19:10 — Turning Down a Life-Changing Acquisition Offer
21:12 — One Foot in Front of the Other
24:04 — Atoms to Atoms
27:33 — The Talent Flywheel
30:20 — Protecting the Last Weird Corner of the Internet

[Pim de Witte @PimDeWitte]

Medal just broke a run rate of 3 billion clips per year :) proud of the team!

[Sergei Sorokin @sergeisorokin]

I spent 8 years scaling Discord and got burnt out cause modern work is broken. We’re overwhelmed with too much info across apps, teams, and agents.

AI made it worse. We’re building the solve.

I've joined @tryhighlight as CEO and we raised a $40M Series A led by @KhoslaVentures.

[James Swingos @JSwingos]

@sergeisorokin @tryhighlight @khoslaventures To the moon

[James Swingos @JSwingos]

Highlight is building a connected enterprise knowledge layer, alongside automated tasking systems by proactively identifying your action items and problems. With these two things together, we can get another OOM increase in enterprise productivity on top of LLMs.

[Sergei Sorokin @sergeisorokin]

I spent 8 years scaling Discord and got burnt out cause modern work is broken. We’re overwhelmed with too much info across apps, teams, and agents.

AI made it worse. We’re building the solve.

I've joined @tryhighlight as CEO and we raised a $40M Series A led by @KhoslaVentures.

[Pim de Witte @PimDeWitte]

Packy and I spent the past month unpacking world models from first principles. This piece is the result of that exploration. We go into why, what, how, and look out into the future on the implications of our work.

[Packy McCormick @packyM]

There is a tremendous amount of progress happening in World Models.

Multiple labs have raised more than $1B. WMs were the star of GTC. They are a real path to embodied AI.

So @PimDeWitte & I wrote a comprehensive 19k word overview of World Models.

https://t.co/DJnKX6ePc2

[James Swingos @JSwingos]

@KentitoRollins @asha_shar @lulumeservey 100%. I, for one, am very excited to see what Asha brings to gaming!

[paula wehmeyer @pallipau]

Seeking a creative generalist at @gen_intuition in NYC

> can own and run strategic projects in ops and marketing
> stellar operator who gets things done
> generator and executor of wild ideas
> mega taste and charisma
> gives a damn about operations, marketing, brand/narrative, team building
> couple years experience in high growth tech/AI, venture, consulting, media

General Intuition has raised 133M from GC and Khosla BUT it’s your chance to get in early, we are still only a team of 12.

[General Intuition @gen_intuition]

We’re hiring at General Intuition in NYC!

We recently announced a $133.7M seed round to build a new AI lab focused on world models and spatial-temporal reasoning.

In particular, we are building our data function here. If you know an amazing data / infrastructure engineer (or are one yourself), let’s talk!

DM any of us on the GI team - JDs below.

[General Intuition @gen_intuition]

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist, Meta, @ylecun), @PimDeWitte (CEO, General Intuition), and Aude Durand (Kyutai, @aude_drn), talk about world models, embodied agents, Yann's new company, and the limitations of LLMs

0:00 - Introduction to World Models
5:00 - Why World Models, Intuition & Introducing Yann's new company
10:00 - Architectures + Merging Language & Interaction Data towards General Agents
20:00 - Open Source, Sovereign AI & @kyutai_labs Partnership

Keynote for #aiPULSE2025 at Station F in Paris 🇫🇷

[Pim de Witte @PimDeWitte]

Excited to do the keynote on World Models with @ylecun at AI Pulse on Thursday. still not quite sure why I got invited to share the time with this legend (if it’s a typo, you can still tell me!), but hopefully we can all go find out in Paris, I will be as curious as you! 🤣

[James Swingos @JSwingos]

Great to see Pim tell the story on stage at Slush

[General Intuition @gen_intuition]

"We invented text as this way of compressing the world around us. Now, we  model systems that represent interactions of how the real world works." - Our CEO @PimDeWitte in discussion with @johnhanke of @NianticSpatial moderated by @mbaierlentz - at @SlushHQ 2025. Perfect Thanksgiving content digest 🦃

[kyutai @kyutai_labs]

Launching @kyutai_labs x @gen_intuition - research collab at the frontier

World models and agents capable of spatiotemporal reasoning are the next frontier. As builders of this technology, we have a responsibility to educate.

This is impossible without both unique data and world-leading talent. Through our research collaboration, both labs will share data and talent seamlessly.

The necessary data lives inside only a few companies, and isn’t available on the internet. With 1B+ ground truth action labeled video uploads per year @gen_intuition owns the largest, most diverse, ground truth action labelled dataset. @kyutai_labs utilizes the data for open research, resuming their culture of publishing on the frontier

Talent moves between the two labs, switching freely between open-ended research and application

Join us in NYC and Europe:
open roles at GI: https://t.co/qXrsUM0Ukj
open roles at Kyutai: https://t.co/NwlFThBkib

[kyutai @kyutai_labs]

The frontier of world models and agents is overwhelmingly in Europe. Kyutai is excited to partner with General Intuition @gen_intuition to continue pushing that edge through open science.

[Vinod Khosla @vkhosla]

Amazing how valuable the game data is for real world data. Only games have action on controller and reaction in the world in a physics accurate way. And if you have data from thousands of games and tens of millions of gamers and billions of hours you are in position to win big in this race.

[James Swingos @JSwingos]

The data set and team will bring on an era where robots can accomplish any task in any environment

[RoboPapers @RoboPapers]

With enough data, robots and AI can learn “world models” that let them predict the results of their actions. These models are a way to learn how embodied AI agents can perform a wide variety of useful tasks — but they require a huge amount of data.

The team at General Intuition @gen_intuition has a solution: use data from video games! Games teach movement, problem solving, and complex spatial reasoning, and they come in a staggering diversity of forms, covering a wide variety of problems. What’s more, the captured data is high-quality, without the noise or annotation error that can come from

We sat down with @PimDeWitte and @AdamJelley2 from the General Intuition team to learn more about their history, their plans, and their philosophy.

[Vinod Khosla @vkhosla]

Very likely current approaches to world models will be obsoleted by a powerful data set like what @gen_intuition has. Very optimistic this approach will be among the winners relative to current ways of building them

[General Intuition @gen_intuition]

Our co-founders share more about building foundation models for spatial intelligence. When you already have billions of action labeled videos, you can skip the world models and go straight into spatiotemporal agents, leaping every company working on world models by years.

[General Intuition @gen_intuition]

We had a great time on @tbpn yesterday sharing more about General Intuition's $133.7M Seed from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, and Raine. Here's our CEO, @PimDeWitte, talking about the research and the future of world models.