The 10,000 Hours Rule and the Quest for Better AI Training

My old hobby is Martial Arts, and MA is mainly about training… lots of training.

👉🏽 Remember the10,000 hours rule that Malcolm Gladwell drafted, asserting that the key to achieving true expertise in any skill is simply a matter of practicing, albeit in the correct way, for at least 10,000 hours.

👉🏽 Well, now that AI controlled humanoid robots are getting more popular, I remembered my old Sensei teaching: That 10,000 hours of bad training need more than that to undue old habits.

👉🏽 This is particularly true for finetuning a model, for example in the attached video you can see part of a training session of a punching robot via VR motion capture setup, yet the guy who’s doing the training gives a very bad example of boxing.

👉🏽 Effective boxing is done from the legs with hip movement and this robot will never be able to do that. A better solution for that will be, getting a better trainer, or using some force feedback and physical simulation to the training process.

👉🏽 Till then, I’ll keep using human training partners.