I still think that AI development should be embodied, and am willing to entertain the possibility that you don't need simulation at scale to train it (e.g. some

I still think that AI development should be embodied, and am willing to entertain the possibility that you don't need simulation at scale to train it (e.g. some clever unsupervised learning algorithm). Evaluating a system that can do millions of things is simply impossible in reality, and that alone necessitates some kind of software-based evaluation metric. I agree that there is a ways to go - but I think trying to make simulation more like reality is a safer bet than having a low ceiling on iteration speed in real.