Richard Sutton is the father of reinforcement learning, winner of the 2024 Turing Award, and author of The Bitter Lesson. And he thinks LLMs are a dead end. After interviewing him, my steel man of Richard’s position is this: LLMs aren’t capable of learning on-the-job, so no matter how much we scale, we’ll need some new architecture to enable continual learning. And once we have it, we won’t need a special training phase — the agent will just learn on-the-fly, like all humans, and indeed, like all animals. This new paradigm will render our current approach with LLMs obsolete.
In our interview, I did my best to represent the view that LLMs might function as the foundation on which experiential learning can happen… Some sparks flew. A big thanks to the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute for inviting me up to Edmonton and for letting me use their studio and equipment. Enjoy!
Transcript:
dwarkesh.com/p/richard-sutton
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
00:00:00 – Are LLMs a dead end?
00:13:51 – Do humans do imitation learning?
00:23:57 – The Era of Experience
00:34:25 – Current architectures generalize poorly out of distribution
00:42:17 – Surprises in the AI field
00:47:28 – Will The Bitter Lesson still apply after AGI?
00:54:35 – Succession to AI
