Today I explored an idea for what might happen if an AI model runs continuously, processing inputs, acting and receiving sensory inputs without interruption. Maybe in a text-adventure game. Instead of responding to isolated prompts, the AI would live in a simulated environment, interacting with its world in real time. The experiment is about observing whether behaviors like an understanding of time, awareness, or even a sense of self could emerge naturally through sustained operation.
The plan is simple: let the bot run indefinitely, receiving sensory inputs and responding to them. The idea is to see if patterns of self-awareness emerge just from interacting with the environment. To make things more interesting, the world could start with a batch of bots, with new ones introduced over time, creating a kind of multi-generational system of learned behaviors.
Other details include adding "teacher bots" to guide the AI at the start, occasional interactions with human players for feedback, and strategies to manage the growing memory efficiently. There’s also the possibility of introducing existential "drives" to shape the AI's motivation or pausing periodically to compress memory into neural weights.
This is still very much a vague idea, but I'm curious about what would happen with this kind of training. Long-term memory and context size will be technical challenges.