Experts weigh in on AI

Richard S. Sutton, Turing Award winner, principal founder of the field of Reinforcement Learning, professor of computing science at the University of Alberta

The "Bitter Lesson" is based on the historical observation that AI researchers have often tried to build knowledge directly into their agents. This approach always helps in the short term and is personally satisfying to researchers. But in the long run, it often reaches a plateau and can even inhibit further progress. Breakthroughs eventually come from the opposite approach: scaling computation through search and learning. The lesson, therefore, is that from the very beginning we should focus on scaling computation through search and learning. We should seek the fundamental principles of intelligence rather than become distracted by the specific characteristics of the human mind. We should allow the agent to discover these principles on its own.