Sutton, R. S. (2019). The Bitter Lesson. — incompleteideas.net
Arguably the most influential essay in artificial intelligence - Dwarkesh Patel
We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run. The bitter lesson is based on the historical observations that 1) AI researchers have often tried to build knowledge into their agents, 2) this always helps in the short term, and is personally satisfying to the researcher, but 3) in the long run it plateaus and even inhibits further progress, and 4) breakthrough progress eventually arrives by an opposing approach based on scaling computation by search and learning. - bitter_lesson, page 2
“We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run.”
The “bitter” realization is that 70 years of AI research show that general methods leveraging computation (scaling) always eventually outperform methods that rely on human knowledge (hand-crafted rules or specialized architectures) 05:01.