https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/30/17621112/openai-robot-dexterity-dactyl-artificial-intelligence

Nothing in this world — animal or robot — quite comes close to the flexibility and dexterity of the human hand. For engineers at the Elon Musk-founded nonprofit OpenAI, this presented both a challenge and an opportunity. How could their researchers use artificial intelligence to teach a robot to manipulate objects as artfully as a human?

Usually, when teaching an AI to control a physical robot, scientists tend to come up against the same problems. Training is often done using reinforcement learning; a method where the AI learns through a process of trial and error. But this requires a lot of time, usually amounting to years of experience. That’s fine if you want an AI to beat, say, a video game — you just let it play the game at an accelerated rate. But if you want to teach it a real-life task, you’re in trouble. You can’t wait for robot arms to muddle through years of practice, and it’s hard to get a simulation of the world that’s accurate enough for training purposes.