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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

See my response to strbean upthread.

Okay. It seems to me that, in analogy to humans having such a relationship with physical reality, machine learning systems have such a relationship with virtual reality — the environment in which they are trained and deployed.

> machine learning systems have such a relationship with virtual reality

No, they don't, because they can't take actions in that virtual reality and sense the consequences. They can't test hypotheses about how the reality works. They can't even frame hypotheses about how the reality works.

Right, but some neural networks are trained in virtual 3D physical simulations and are able to apply their knowledge acquired through statistical regression of a simulated world to perform tasks and even make predictions. It's logical that a network trained purely on language has no real understanding of physical reality, but it doesn't preclude that a sense of reality in the way we humans think we have can't be gained by the same statistical analysis of the real world.

> some neural networks are trained in virtual 3D physical simulations and are able to apply their knowledge acquired through statistical regression of a simulated world to perform tasks and even make predictions

As you note, this is very different from using text data as a training set for a language model. I am not familiar enough with this work to comment on it in any detail, but it is not the kind of work I have been addressing in my comments elsewhere in this thread, so my comments should certainly not be taken as any kind of evaluation of what I think this kind of thing is or is not capable of.

Wait, you mean virtual reality isn’t like the cartoon Reboot!?

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