Richard Sutton, father of RL, thinks LLMs are a dead end

Interview by Dwarkesh Patel with Richard Sutton on LLMs, AGI and why he believes AGI will not be born from using LLMs.

In his essay The Bitter Lesson, he argues for not building AI from mimicking human behavior in our systems: "breakthrough progress eventually arrives by an opposing approach based on scaling computation by search and learning."

The Bitter Lesson In computer chess, the methods that defeated the world champion, Kasparov, in 1997, were based on massive, deep search. At the time, this was looked upon with dismay by the majority of computer-chess researchers who had pursued methods that leveraged human understanding of the special structure of chess. When a simpler, search-based approach with special hardware and software proved vastly more effective, these human-knowledge-based chess researchers were not good losers. www.incompleteideas.net