As someone who is doing robotics and behavior cloning for a while, it’s incredibly funny to see the self-taught genius rediscover what’s been known in the field for 30 years and can be found by walking in to the first two lectures of any decision making/control theory class.

In practice, deep learning based behavior cloning works when there is enough data for the model to interpolate to the next “frame”, the proof of which is GPT and other LLMs whose primary training objective is practically behavior cloning. However, adding a neural network means there are some hallucinations, which can range for silly (for LLMs) to murderous (for self driving). However, this presents a huge opportunity as well, in that anyone who can solve hallucinations can make headway into not one but two billion dollar problems at once.