The Allure of Flight and Anxiety of Landing: XPeng's 'Land Aircraft Carrier' via Reinforcement Learning

If I had to use a metaphor to describe the feeling of doing reinforcement learning, it would be roughly this—you train an agent that runs smoothly in a simulation environment, scores hitting the ceiling, but once you put it on a real robot, it turns into a dumb donkey crashing into walls. The gap between simulation and reality, we call the sim-to-real gap. And XPeng Motors' announcement today of "mass production of flying cars" is essentially crossing a much larger chasm: from concept to product, from PPT to delivery, from "can fly" to "flies safely."