Just found an interview with Richard Sutton referencing his "Bitter Lesson" post from 2019. See link at the bottom.
He claims to be making two points. I think his first one is a useful view for considering what AI topic might be more fruitful in the long run. Here long run is meant as on a personal level, not on a long run of Science. Read further along.
The successful approaches would be based fundamentally only on "search" and "learning". These are what often are critized as "simple brute-force approaches".
This approach has been the one leading to the current wide-spread adoption and surprising effectiveness of RL -exemplified by solutions like AlphaGo, AlphaZero-, DeepLearning and LLMs.
And this success should be contrasted to the comparatively failed attempts at implementing techniques bearing what our own understanding of how we solve the same tasks or how we learn is.
In summary, trying to come up with techniques based on our previous world models fared way worse than techniques based on simple, general brute-force methods.
As he mentions in that interview, these claims are meant but as a reflection of what has or not worked out in the past 70 or so years. He makes no claim this will be the case in the future.
His second claim consists of his very last paragraph. However, I'm not certain if his point here isn't just a rephrasing of the previous one.
Neither am I convinced he is consistent: One might argue that what he thinks of "search & learning " are but idealizations, i.e., models of methods created by our minds. In particular, I think that what he considers as "learning" is simply RL, reinforced learning.
But this method is nothing but human knowledge that we would be putting into the AI, which is the approach he seems to be arguing against in this second point.
His only argument around this seems to be that he considers these two processes as simple enough for serving as guiding principles. They do fit with the view of his first point though.
References
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_S._Sutton
* http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
No comments:
Post a Comment