the point is not lack of access to physical space, as much as that iteration fundamentally only gains speed by staying 'inside a mind', the moment you interact with the world you're bottlenecked.
Like, you can make the AI think super hard about what's the phrase that will convince your boss to give you a raise, but eventually you have to try a phrase and wait for their answer to have any idea whether the result was good or not. Without that, you don't know if you're improving the shot or just hallucinating aimlessly for hours.
Then, the speed of improvement is only as fast as the speed of iteration. The robot can learn to walk from falling, but it can't fall any faster than a real human, so it can't learn at 1M falls/second.
Like, you can make the AI think super hard about what's the phrase that will convince your boss to give you a raise, but eventually you have to try a phrase and wait for their answer to have any idea whether the result was good or not. Without that, you don't know if you're improving the shot or just hallucinating aimlessly for hours.
Then, the speed of improvement is only as fast as the speed of iteration. The robot can learn to walk from falling, but it can't fall any faster than a real human, so it can't learn at 1M falls/second.