As soon as I entered General Intuition’s R&D floor at its New York office, the company’s 31-year-old co-founder and CEO Pim de Witte directed my attention to a monitor perched on a standing desk. Someone appeared to be playing Fortnite. It wasn’t a person.
“Our agent has been playing for 100 hours straight,” Kent Rollins, the company’s chief product officer, said, beaming.
Before I could get absorbed in the spectacle of an AI navigating the game’s virtual environment, I heard the electronic footsteps of a large quadrupedal robot approaching.
“The same brain powering the agent playing Fortnite is powering the robot,” de Witte told me. Josh Duplantis, a data analyst carrying a laptop streaming a live feed from the robot’s single camera, piped up to explain that the bot’s default mode was “exploration.”
Relying on that camera, its singular eye, the giant bug-like bot walked up to me, circled around me, and continued into the office. It occasionally clipped the legs of chairs or bumped into an errant trash bin, much like a toddler that hasn’t yet learned how her body relates to the world around it. Duplantis said it took just eight minutes of real-world robotics data to fine-tune an AI model for the quadruped. What’s more, that data was collected on the street, not inside the office where the bot was currently navigating itself.
