OpenAI just offered $500 million for a gaming platform's data, signaling the industry's frantic race to build world models - AI that can understand and navigate 3D space like humans. The bid for Medal's gaming clips reveals why spatial reasoning has become the next battleground for achieving artificial general intelligence.
The AI industry just revealed its next obsession, and it's not what you'd expect. While everyone's been focused on ChatGPT and language models, the real money is chasing something far more fundamental - teaching AI to understand space and physics like a human brain.
Medal founder Pim de Witte discovered this firsthand when he started shopping his gaming platform's data to AI labs last year. Within weeks, acquisition offers poured in, including a reported $500 million bid from OpenAI. "We received multiple acquisition offers very quickly," de Witte told The Verge. "Initially, we were quite interested in them, but that was mostly a result of us not understanding what we were sitting on."
What he was sitting on turns out to be worth far more than $500 million. Today, de Witte announced that Medal is spinning out a new AI lab called General Intuition, backed by a massive $133.7 million seed round led by Vinod Khosla - the same investor who backed OpenAI in 2018. It's Khosla Ventures' largest seed check since that OpenAI bet.
The prize? Medal's treasure trove of 2 billion gaming video uploads per year from tens of thousands of games. But this isn't about entertainment - it's about building "world models," AI systems that can predict and interact with physical environments. Think of a robot that sees a glass of water teetering on a table edge and instinctively grabs it before it falls.
"Games are basically the only verifiable domain for spatial-temporal reasoning," de Witte explained to reporters. "You can separate a good action from a bad action, which is why it's so valuable." While large language models learned to write by consuming internet text, world models need to learn physics by watching how objects move and interact in controlled 3D environments.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has been the loudest advocate for world models as the path to artificial general intelligence. The company recently demonstrated Genie 3, which generates playable game environments in real-time as users navigate them. Meanwhile, AI legend Fei-Fei Li's World Labs this week showing interactive video generation.
