Brilliant analogy.

And we can imagine that, in a sci-fi world where some super-being could act on a scale that would allow it to perturb the world in a fashion amenable to causing hurricanes, the hurricane model could be substantially augmented, for the same reason motor babbling in an infant leads to fluid motion as a child.

What has been a revelation to me is how, even peering through this dark glass, titanic amounts of data allow quite useful world models to emerge, even if they're super limited -- a type of "bitter lesson" that suggests we're only at the beginning of what's possible.

I expect robotics + LLM to drive the next big breakthroughs, perhaps w/ virtual worlds [1] as an intermediate step.

[1] https://minedojo.org/