The speaker thinks that sufficiently data-efficient AI, able to learn quickly from examples and select useful examples through good research taste, could rapidly catch up despite initially lagging far behind the accumulated knowledge of an Australian Aboriginal person with roughly 50,000 years of experimentation and examples.

“You can learn things more quickly from pure examples,”

“and like this good research taste,”

“where you can decide what things to look at to get these examples,”

“then you are still going to start off much worse than an Australian aborigine who has the advantage of, let's say, 50,000 years of doing these experiments and collecting these examples,”

“but you can catch up quickly.”