The Man Who Walked Away from OpenAI and Raised $134 Million Instead

The way we build games is about to change more in the next five years than it has in the last thirty. Not because of engines. Not because of platforms.

But because of world models. When I asked Pim De Witte , the founder of General Intuition , a company that recently raised $134M seed round , how games will be built in the future, his answer wasn’t another tired “AI will help with assets” take. He described a creative revolution that moves from scripted to generative , and finally to agentic systems .

In other words, games that think, act, and react. In this world, the deterministic logic of Unity and Unreal won’t disappear, but it will be augmented by systems that behave less like machines and more like living organisms. “A lot of what makes games great today,” Pim said, “is determinism.

But LLMs and AI models are non-deterministic. ” Translated for the knuckledraggers like myself, this means, for example, that in a game, bots will be indistinguishable from players. Everything from friendly fire to flanking maneuvers, missed shots, or even panic retreats will feel human.

This is because the AI won’t just follow rules, but rather understand the world it’s in. The future of games might look less like code and more like jazz: structured enough to make sense, chaotic enough to keep us playing. What Are World Models (and Why They Matter) If language models predict words, world models predict what happens next.

In simple terms: A video model predicts the next frame of a scene.   When you jump, shoot, or turn a corner, a world model doesn’t just guess what should be shown next; it understands why these actions are taken. It simulates causality, not just the visuals.

This is huge because every great game is built on cause and effect. You act, the world responds. From Pong to Minecraft , that’s been the essence of play.

World models supercharge this by learning from billions of gameplay clips, understanding not just how worlds look, but how players behave within them. tv, even when OpenAI reportedly came calling with $500 million . He wanted to build AI born from games.

“Games are where humans go to express their intelligence at the highest level,” Pim said. “They’re the perfect merge of all modalities, text, geometry, perception, and action. ” Only an AI-Native Studio Can Reap The Full Benefits of AI.

Right?? The short answer: no. The real answer: you need to be AI-fluent.