Generally Intelligent secures cash from OpenAI vets to build capable AI systems

A new AI research company is launching out of stealth today with an ambitious goal: to research the fundamentals of human intelligence that machines currently lack. Called Generally Intelligent, it plans to do this by turning these fundamentals into an array of tasks to be solved and by designing and testing different systems' ability to learn to solve them in highly complex 3D worlds built by their team. "We believe that generally intelligent computers will someday unlock extraordinary potential for human creativity and insight," CEO Kanjun Qiu told TechCrunch in an email interview. "However, today's AI models are missing several key elements of human intelligence, which inhibits the development of general-purpose AI systems that can be deployed safely … Generally Intelligent's work aims to understand the fundamentals of human intelligence in order to engineer safe AI systems that can learn and understand the way humans do." Qiu, the former chief of staff at Dropbox and the co-founder of Ember Hardware, which designed laser displays for VR headsets, co-founded Generally Intelligent in 2021 after shutting down her previous startup, Sourceress, a recruiting company that used AI to scour the web.