I think there's an implicit assumption here that interaction with the world is critical for effective learning. In that case, you're bottlenecked by the speed of the world... when learning with a single agent. One neat thing about artificial computational agents, in contrast to natural biological agents, is that they can share the same brain and share lived experience, so the "speed of reality" bottleneck is much less of an issue.

Yeah I'm envisioning putting a thousand simplistic robotic "infants" into a vast "playpen" to gather sensor data about their environment, for some (probably smaller) number of deep learning models to ingest the input and guess at output strategies (move this servo, rotate this camshaft this far in that direction, etc) and make predictions about resulting changes to input.

In principle a thousand different deep learning models could all train simultaneously on a thousand different robot experience feeds.. but not 1 to 1, but instead 1 to many.. each neural net training on data from dozens or hundreds of the robots at the same time, and different neural nets sharing those feeds for their own rounds of training.

Then of course all of the input data paired with outputs tested and further inputs as ground truth to predictions can be recorded for continued training sessions after the fact.

> In that case, you're bottlenecked by the speed of the world

Why not have the AI train on a simulation of the real world? We can build those pretty easily using traditional software and run them at any speed we want.