[bradenb]

Can someone that understands ML better than I tell me if there is a point where the AI can indefinitely train on data generated by other AI? If AI is trained on human development work product and then it eliminates human developers, will the capabilities of the AI be stuck indefinitely at the level of the software from which the models were trained? Not sure if I'm making sense, but the crux of my question is: can AI effectively generate their own training data sets? If not, then I don't see how it could replace an industry.

[bagels]

Self supervised learning is an attempt at this idea. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-supervised_learning

[BlueTemplar]

Yes, this has been how programs (not necessarily neural network-based) have been breaking records for a while now :

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/skynet-meets-the-swar...

> [Ben Weber] set about organizing a tournament for StarCraft AI agents to compete against each other, hoping to kick-start progress and raise interest.

> The announcement for the tournament was made in November of 2009, and the word soon went out on gaming websites and blogs: the 2010 Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) Conference, to be held in October 2010 at Stanford University, would host the first ever StarCraft AI competition.

[...]

> the only way to really test and improve the agent would be to play against skilled human players. Flush with pride that the agent could defeat the built-in AI, we played a game during the class against John Blitzer, a post-doc in Dan’s group who played ranked ladder matches on International Cyber Cup (iCCup).

> It was a disaster.

[...]

> Manually iterating through parameters and making adjustments would take far too long, however.

> Instead, we let the Overmind learn to fight on its own.

> In Norse mythology, Valhalla is a paradise where warriors’ souls engage in eternal battle. Using StarCraft’s map editor, we built Valhalla for the Overmind, where it could repeatedly and automatically run through different combat scenarios. By running repeated trials in Valhalla and varying the potential field strengths, the agent learned the best combination of parameters for each kind of engagement.

[...]

> Recruiting Oriol as our “coach” helped us apply the final touches. Oriol had played StarCraft at the pro level before retiring and turning to a life of science, and he joined the team as our coach, designated opponent, and in-house StarCraft expert.

> With a high-level human expert to test against and all of the algorithms in place, the agent progressed rapidly in the last few weeks, culminating in that first victory against Oriol mere days before the final submission.

[...]

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/30/20939147/deepmind-google...

> Like OpenAI, DeepMind trains its AI agents against versions of themselves and at an accelerated pace, so that the agents can clock hundreds of years of play time in the span of a few months. That has allowed this type of software to stand on equal footing with some of the most talented human players of Go and, now, much more sophisticated games like Starcraft [2] and Dota [2].

Note that they are lucky there to have a controlled environment, meaning that experimentation is cheap, with clear goals - something that is not always the case in "real" life !