Part 7/16:
One of Thoren’s most memorable achievements was developing a system capable of learning to conduct a TV interview with minimal prior knowledge—only two pages of sparse code—demonstrating the feasibility of learning from scratch. Remarkably, the system learned to perform a five-minute recycling interview after just 20 hours of training on a laptop, a feat he describes as "wildly out of the ballpark." Such breakthroughs reinforce the potential for AI systems to acquire complex skills rapidly when designed with appropriate principles.