Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

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. […] 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.

Long interview from the Dwarkesh Patel Podcast. I like the more technical/philosophical arguments. And I think it’s a more nuanced perspective than what we normally hear about AI.

https://piped.video/watch?v=21EYKqUsPfg