Why Grounding Is Safety
A model can only be as aligned with human reality
as the data that raised it.
A robot that has never seen thousands of hours of humans navigating real spaces will fail, no matter how carefully its objectives were set. A medical model that has never seen real lab panels will hallucinate biology with perfect fluency.
Ungrounded capability is the dangerous kind.
The Precedent
Before 2012, everyone believed algorithms were the bottleneck. Then ImageNet, "just a dataset," met a neural network and ignited the deep learning revolution.
The dataset was the discontinuity.