A neural net can produce information outside of its original data set, but it is all and directly derived from that initial set. There are fundamental information constraints here. You cannot use a neural net to itself generate from its existing data set wholly new and original full quality training data for itself.
You can use a neural net to generate data, and you can train a net on that data, but you'll end up with something which is no good.
Humans are dependent on their input data (through lifetime learning and, perhaps, information encoded in the brain from evolution), and yet they can produce out of distribution information. How?
There is an uncountably large number of models that perfectly replicate the data they're trained on; some generalize out of distribution much better. Something like dreaming might be a form of regularization: experimenting with simpler structures that perform equally well on training data but generalize better (e.g. by discovering simple algorithms that reproduce the data equally well as pure memorization but require simpler neural circuits than the memorizing circuits).
Once you have those better generalizing circuits, you can generate data that not only matches the input data in quality but potentially exceeds it, if the priors built into the learning algorithm match the real world.
Humans produce out-of-distribution data all the time, yet if you had a teacher making up facts and teaching them to your kids, you would probably complain.
I might be misunderstanding your comment so sorry if so. Robots have sensors and RL is a thing, they can collect real world data and then processing and consolidating real world experiences during downtime (or in real time), running simulations to prepare for scenarios, and updating models based on the day's collected data. The way I saw it that I thought was impressive was the robot understood the scene, but didn't know how the scene would respond to it's actions, so it gens videos of the possible scenarios, and then picks the best ones and models it's actuation based on it's "imagination".
This is definitely one of the potential issues that might happen to embodied agents/robots/bodies trained on the "world model". As we are training a model for the real world based on a model that simulates the real world, the glitches in the world simulator model will be incorporated into the training. There will be edge cases due to this layered "overtraining", where a robot/agent/body will expect Y to happen but X will happen, causing unpredictable behaviour.I assume that a generic world agent will be able to autocorrect, but this could also lead to dangerous issues.
I.e. if the simulation has enough videos of firefighters breaking glass where it seems to drop instantaneously and in the world sim it always breaks, a firefighter robot might get into a problem when confronted with unbreakable glass, as it expects it to break as always, leading to a loop of trying to shatter the glass instead of performing another action.
The benefit of these AI-generated simulation models as a training mechanism is that it helps add robustness without requiring a large training set. The recombinations can generate wider areas of the space to explore and learn with but using a smaller basis space.
To pick an almost trivial example, let's say OCR digit recognition. You'll train on the original data-set, but also on information-preserving skews and other transforms of that data set to add robustness (stretched numbers, rotated numbers, etc.). The core operation here is taking a smallset in some space (original training data) and producing some bigset in that same space (generated training data).
For simple things like digit recognition, we can imagine a lot of transforms as simple algorithms, but one can consider more complex problems and realize that an ML model would be able to do a good job of learning how to generate bigset candidates from the smallset.
We are miles away from the fundamental constraint. We know that our current training methodologies are scandalously data inefficient compared to human/animal brains. Augmenting observations with dreams has long been theorized to be (part of) the answer.
> current training methodologies are scandalously data inefficient compared to human/animal brains
Are you sure? I've been ingesting boatloads of high definition multi-sensory real-time data for quite a few decades now, and I hardly remember any of it. Perhaps the average quality/diversity of LLM training data has been higher, but they sure remember a hell of a lot more of it than I ever could.
It is possible - for example, getting a blob of physics data, fitting a curve then projecting the curve to theorise what would happen in new unseen situations. The information constraints don't limit the ability to generate new data in a specific domain from a small sample; indeed it might be possible to fully comprehend the domain if there is an underlying process it can infer. It is impossible to come up with wildly unrelated domains though.
Approximately speaking, you have a world model and an agent model. You continue to train the world model using data collected by the robot day-to-day. The robot "dreams" by running the agent model against the world model instead of moving around in the real world. Dreaming for thousands of (simulated) hours is much more efficient than actually running the physical hardware for thousands of wall clock hours.
Give it tool access let it formulate it's own experiments etc.
The only question here is if it becomes a / the singularity because of this, gets stuck in some local minimum or achieves random perfection and random local minimum locations.
Humans can learn from visualising situations and thinking through different scenarios. I don't see why AI / robots can't do similar. In fact I think quite a lot of training for things like Tesla self driving is done in simulation.
"Consciousness" is an overloaded thought killer that swerves all conversation into obfuscated semantic arguments. One person will be talking about 'internality' and self-image (in the testable, mechanical sense that you could argue Chain of Thought models already have in a petty way) and the other will be grappling with the concept of qualia and the ineffable nature of human experience.
That's not even a devil's advocate, many other animals clearly have consciousness, at least if we're not solipsistic. There have been many very dangerous precedents in medicine where people have been declared "brain dead" only to awake and remember.
Since consciousness is closely linked to being a moral patient, it is all the more important to err on the side of caution when denying qualia to other beings.
AI has traditionally been driven by "metaphor-driven development" where people assume the brain has system X, program something they give the same name, and then assume because they've given it that name it must work because it works in the brain.
This is generally a bad idea, but a few of the results like "neural networks" did work out… eventually.
"World model" is another example of a metaphor like this. They've assumed that humans have world models (most likely not true), and that if they program something and call it a "world model" it will work the same way (definitely not true) and will be beneficial (possibly true).
(The above critique comes from Phil Agre and David Chapman.)
I'm invested in a startup that is doing something unrelated robotics, but they're spending a lot of time in Shenzhen, I keep a very close eye on robotics and was talking to their CTO about what he is seeing in China, versions of this are already being implemented.
And these are consumer options, affordable to you and me, not only to some military. If those are the commonly available options... there may be way more advanced stuff that we haven't seen.
this stuff is old tech, and has nothing to do with transformers. The Boston Dynamics style robot dogs are always shown in marketing demos like the one you linked in secretly very controlled environments. Let me know when I can order one that will bring the laundry downstairs for my wife.
I asked for real examples from someone who claimed to have first hand experience, not more marketing bullshit
So prescient. I definitely think this will be a thing in the near future ~12-18 months time horizon