Sergey Levine

Well, and I should say that the coding is probably like the pinnacle of abstract knowledge work in the sense that like just by the mathematical nature of computer programming, it's an extremely abstract activity, which is why people struggle with it so much.

This is a very subtle question.

Your example with the airplane pilot using simulation is really interesting.

But something to remember is that

When a pilot is using a simulator to learn to fly an airplane, they're extremely goal-directed.

So their goal in life is not to learn to use a simulator.

Their goal in life is to learn to fly the airplane.

They know there will be a test afterwards, and they know that eventually they'll be in charge of like a few hundred passengers, and they really need to not crash that thing.

And when we train –

models on data from multiple different domains the models don't know that they're supposed to solve a particular task they just see like hey here's one thing i need to master here's another thing i need to master so maybe like a better analogy there is if you if you're like playing a video game where you can fly an airplane and then eventually someone puts you in the cockpit of a real of a real one like it's not that the video game is useless but it's it's not the same thing and if you're

trying to play that video game and your goal is to like really like master the video game, you're not going to go about it in quite the same way.

Yeah, yeah.

So I think what you're trying to say is basically that, well, maybe if we have like a really smart model that's doing meta-learning, perhaps it can figure out that its performance on a downstream problem, a real-world problem, is increased by doing something in a simulator.

Yeah, that's right.

But here's the thing with this.

There's –

A set of these ideas that are all going to be like something like train to make it better on the real thing by leveraging something else.

And the key linchpin for all of that is the ability to train to be better on the real thing.

The thing is like I actually suspect in reality we might not even need to do something quite so explicit because –

Metal learning is emergent, as you pointed out before, right?