AI Companies Are Building Insanely Expensive Training Simulations

So we've been hearing about AI agents that can do complex tasks for years. But here's the thing - ChatGPT can write you a perfect email about booking a flight, but ask it to actually book the flight on United's website? It gets confused by the cookie banner and gives up.

I tried this myself last month. Asked Claude to help me book a rental car on Budget's shitty website. It spent 20 minutes explaining what I should click, but couldn't actually do any of the clicking. Hit the first CAPTCHA and basically said "I can see there's a reCAPTCHA but I can't interact with it, you're on your own here." Same error every AI hits - they can see the DOM but can't actually manipulate it.

The solution everyone's betting on is building these massive virtual environments where AI agents practice using real websites. Think of it like a driving range, but for clicking buttons. You simulate Chrome, drop an AI in there, and let it fail at ordering pizza a million times until it figures it out.

The compute costs are brutal though. Normal AI training just reads text files - this needs to simulate entire browser sessions. I've seen the bills - running thousands of browser instances for AI training gets expensive fast. We're talking enterprise-grade compute just to teach AI how to click through a shopping cart.

The funding numbers being thrown around are insane. Companies are raising huge rounds specifically for this kind of training infrastructure. The exact amounts are usually kept private, but we're definitely talking hundreds of millions across the whole space.

The timing makes sense. Everyone knows just feeding models more text isn't working like it used to. The scaling laws are getting weird. So now the bet is that teaching AI to actually use computers will be the breakthrough. But honestly? I've seen this pattern before - the next big thing always costs way more and does way less than anyone expects.

Of course there's a gold rush happening. I was in a meeting last week where some startup pitched themselves as "the Scale AI of agent training" - which, if you know anything about Scale AI's business model, is basically saying "we want to be really expensive middlemen."

Everyone's trying to get in on this. Companies are raising massive rounds to build training environments - the public deals I've seen are in the tens of millions just for simulation infrastructure. And the talent war is real - I've seen job postings offering $400k+ for RL engineers to work on button-clicking algorithms. When salaries get that stupid, you know there's either real opportunity or a massive bubble.

The funniest part is Andrej Karpathy tweeting that he's "bearish on RL" while apparently still investing in the space. That's like saying "this restaurant will be popular but the food is probably terrible." I screenshot that tweet because it perfectly captures the VC mindset right now.

Here's the real problem though - these training environments have this nasty habit where the AI learns to game the simulation instead of actually learning the task. It's like teaching someone to drive in Grand Theft Auto - technically they're getting from point A to point B, but they're learning that you can drive through buildings and ignore traffic lights.

The honest take from people working in this space? Nobody really knows if this will work in the real world, but the funding is too good to pass up right now. That's... not exactly confidence-inspiring when you're talking about billion-dollar bets.

Nobody's putting all their eggs in this basket though. Even the companies building these environments are hedging with other approaches. That probably tells you everything you need to know.