L’imprenditore olandese ha rifiutato 500 milioni di dollari e ora vuole vincere lui stesso la gara dell’intelligenza artificiale

It doesn’t happen every day that a Dutch entrepreneur says “no” to 500 million dollars. Pim de Witte did just that when OpenAI, the American company behind ChatGPT, reportedly offered him this astronomical amount for his company. But what the Americans planned to do with his data, De Witte now wants to do himself.

De Witte owns the video platform [Medal.tv](http://Medal.tv), where gamers share footage of their gameplay. And they do so en masse. “YouTube has about 800 million uploads per year. We expect to surpass that this year,” the 30-year-old entrepreneur from Nijmegen tells Nieuwsuur.

Those images, along with the accompanying data, are a gold mine for companies working on the next generation of AI applications. While AI currently focuses mainly on text and chatbots, the next step is training robots to perform tasks independently. And robots can learn how to do those tasks from games. “It’s the largest dataset of how people behave in a simulated world,” says De Witte.

That this game data turns out to be so important for the development of robots is a “surprising development,” says Deborah Nas, professor of innovation at TU Delft. She explains why games are suitable as training material: “The footage is always shot from the same perspective, so it’s very stable material. In addition, you play such a game with a console. In the real world, robots are controlled with a similar game controller.”

OpenAI saw this as well and contacted De Witte—at least, according to several media reports. De Witte cannot confirm that the company offered him 500 million dollars, “but I can tell you what it’s like to turn down 500 million,” he says with a smile. “You take a good look at yourself in the mirror, splash some water in your face, and then pick up the phone.”

In that phone call, he said “no” to an amount many entrepreneurs can only dream of. “After it happened, I immediately thought: my God, did I make the right decision?”

**‘More fun to do it yourself’**
De Witte decided: what the Americans can do, I can do myself. The data that [Medal.tv](http://Medal.tv) has at its disposal is, according to De Witte, so unique that he expects to have a significant head start in further developing this AI technology. “We got to work and discovered that we can overtake them. And yes, then you can become more valuable than what they’re paying, right? And it’s simply more fun to do it yourself.”

Half a year after the multimillion-dollar offer, De Witte still stands by his decision. Investors are lining up for his new company, General Intuition. With this company, De Witte is now working on developing AI systems that mimic spatial understanding, so-called “world models.” In a short time, De Witte has already raised more than 130 million dollars, and investors would be willing to invest hundreds of millions more.

“A lot is expected of these models, but it is still an enormous promise,” says Professor Nas. “And whether that promise will be fulfilled in the AI world remains to be seen.”

**Competition from China and the US**
So far, developments in the field of AI have mainly been an American and Chinese affair. With his new company, De Witte hopes to change that. “I think we have a very good chance from Europe, and that from the Netherlands we have one of the best opportunities.”

Professor Nas is also hopeful. “I think this technology certainly offers an opportunity for Europe, because we have a lot of talent. Developing these kinds of models requires a lot of mathematics and physics, and Europe has excellent university programs in those fields.”

As a portuguese, hope he fails miserebly.

As a Dutch person, i never heard of him. Maybe for the best

I’ve heard a full podcast with this guy ands it’s pretty amazing what they are working on. Also his idea that he wants to be a sovereign European company is pretty nice to hear. 

I wish his company all the success. When someone values you at 500m you are already set for life. This guy surely already has 10m liquid assets. So why selling your work for a ridiculous amount of money that will not improve your quality of life in any meaningful way. Strong dude 💪

This is good news solely because Europe needs more companies in the tech space. I’m not sure that AI is a net positive thing for humanity, but the U.S. and China won’t stop working on it so Europe needs to do so as well.
Maybe the British AI/ML doctors/professors can be tempted to come home? If General Intiution focuses more on AI safety than what we’ve seen from OpenAI and Google so far, perhaps it’s tempting to come work on.

In the end though, I think the Americans, with Google Deepmind in the front, will develop AGI first. I wonder which horrors it will bring.

LOL. You don’t win AI race with entrepreneurs who talk big and deliver nothing. He’s good at raising fund and advertise his yet-to-manifest product, but if you don’t know something, you just don’t. And he definitely doesn’t. Remember Northvolt?

So this is already guaranteed to end up as failure and a huge waste of money. Europe isn’t in the race at all and isn’t even qualified to join, because it has no knowledge and no talent, and its electrify cost is through the roof.

AI race is won by engineers (who are pretty much all Chinese) and electricity (which China has a tremendous advantage). There is no question on who will win the race. All that’s left to do is officiate it.

In the end, when these companies go IPO they always move to the USA prior. The investment money in the USA is just enormously more than what is available in EU. Plus the laws and taxes are much more favourable in the US. 

Plus the number of software engineers and researchers in this field are largely in the US as well. 

So lets see what happens in a few years. 

The fact that he says his site will reach the same game upload count as youtube even though I’ve never heard of them is pretty weird