YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Sutton

lines on the record: 69
first: 2025-09-26
most recent: 2025-09-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The big or one of the really big human enterprises to design society. And that's been ongoing for thousands of years again. And so it's like the more things change, really the more things they stay the same. We still have to figure out how to be. The children will still come up with different values that seem strange to their parents and their grandparents and things will evolve.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you're saying we're trying to design the future and the principles by which it will evolve and come into being. So you're saying the first thing you're saying is well, we will try to teach our children general principles which will promote. Likely evolutions. Maybe we should also seek for things being voluntary. If there is change, we want it to be voluntary rather than imposed. I think that's a very important point. And yeah, that's all good. I think this is like a big, you know, the big.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think it's appropriate for us to really work towards our own local goals. And it's kind of aggressive for us saying, oh, the future has to evolve this way that I want it to. Because then we'll have arguments, right? Different people think the future, the global future should evolve in different ways, and then they have conflict. Yeah. We won't avoid that.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should be concerned about our future, the future. We should try to make it good. We also, though, should recognize the limits, our limits. I think we want to avoid the feeling of entitlement, avoid the feeling, oh, we're here first, we should always have it in a good way. How should we think about the future and how much control of particular species on a particular planet should have over it? How much control do we have? You know, a counterbalance to our limited control over the long-term future of humanity should be how much control do we have over our own lives. Like we have our own goals and we have our families. And those things are much more controllable than like trying to control the whole universe.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's relevant to point out that for most of humanity they don't have much influence on what happens. Most of humanity doesn't influence. Can control the atom bombs or who Controls the nation states. As a citizen, I often feel that we don't control the nation states very much. They're out of control. A lot of it has to do with just how you feel about change. And if you think the current situation is really, really good, then you're more likely to be suspicious of change and averse to change than if you think It's imperfect. And I think it's imperfect. In fact, I think it's pretty bad. So I'm open to change. I think humanity has not had a super good track record. And maybe it's the best thing that there's been, but it's far from perfect.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, are you thinking maybe we are like the Neanderthals who give rise to Homo sapiens? Maybe Homo sapiens will give rise to a new group of people. So that's something that'”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's an interesting thing. What should we consider them part of humanity or different from humanity? It's our choice. It's our choice whether we should say, oh, they are our offspring and we should be proud of them and we should celebrate their achievements or we could say, oh no, they're not us and we should be horrified. It's interesting that that is. It feels to me like a choice and yet it's such a strongly held thing that how could we be a choice? I like these sort of contradictory implications of thought.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mark this as one of the four great stages of the universe. First, there's dust, ends with stars, stars, and then stars make planets, and the planets give rise to life. And now we're giving life to designed entities And so I think we should be proud and we should that we are giving rise to this great transition in the universe.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things that can be intelligent themselves and that are themselves capable of design. And so this is a key step in the world, in the universe, and I think it's the transition from the world in which most of the interesting things that are replicated. Replicated means you can make copies of them, but you don't really understand them. Like right now we can make more intelligent beings, more children, but we don't really understand how intelligence works. Whereas we're reaching now to having design intelligence, intelligence that we do understand how it works, and therefore we can change it in different ways, in a different speeds than otherwise. And our future, they might not be replicated at all. Like we may just design AIs and those AIs will design other AIs and everything will be done by design, construction, rather. Replication”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just understand themselves. So this is a great success as science, humanities. We're finding out what this essential part of humanness is, what it means to be intelligent. Then what I usually say is that this is all kind of human-centric. What if we look, you step aside from being a human and just say, take the point of view of the universe? And this is, I think, a major stage in the universe, a major transition, a transition from replicators, humans and animals, plants. We're all replicators. And that gives us some strengths and some limitations. And then we're entering the age of design where our AIs are designed, all of our physical objects are designed, our buildings are designed, our technology is designed, and we're designing now AIs.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so then I do encourage people to think positively about it. First of all, because it's something we humans have always tried to do for thousands of years, tried to understand themselves, trying to make themselves think better.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you're going to have succession to AI or to AI-enabled augmented humans. So within those four things seem clear and sure to happen. But within that set of possibilities, there can be good outcomes as well as less good outcomes, bad outcomes So I'm just trying to be realistic about where we are and ask how we should feel about it.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I do think succession to digital Or digital intelligence or augmented humans is inevitable. So the argument, I have a forward part argument. The argument step one is there's no government or organization that gives humanity a unified point of view that dominates and that can arrange. There's no consensus about how the world should be run. And number two, we will figure out how intelligence works. Researchers will figure it out eventually. And number three, we won't stop just with human level intelligence. We will get reached superintelligence. And number four is that once it's inevitable over time that the most intelligent things around would gain resources and power. And so put all that together.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this will become a big concern, particularly when you're, oh, he's figured out all about, you know, how to play some new game or figures out he's studied Indonesia and you want to incorporate that into your mind. You think, oh, just read it all in and that'll be fine. But no, you've just read a whole bunch of bits into your mind and they could have viruses in them. They could have hidden goals. They can warp you and change you. And this will become a big thing. How do you have cybersecurity in the age of digital spawning and re-reforming again?”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could where you spawn off many, many copies, do different things, highly decentralized, but report back to the central master. And this will be such a powerful thing. Well, I think one thing that, so this is my attempt to add something to this view, is that a big question, a big issue will become corruption. You know, if you really could just get information from anywhere and bring it into your central mind, you become more and more powerful. And it's all digital and they all speak some internal digital language, maybe it'll be easy and possible. It will not be that easy, as easy as you're imagining, because you can lose your mind this way. If you pull in something from the outside and build it into your inner thinking, it could take over you. It could change you. It could be your destruction rather than your increment in knowledge.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, interesting question is you're an AI, you get some more computer power, should you use it to make yourself more computationally capable? Or should you use it to spawn off a copy of yourself to go learn something interesting on the other side of the planet or on some other topic and then report back to you? That's a really interesting question. That will only arise in the age of digital intelligences. Not sure what the answer is, but I think it will more questions will it be possible to really spawn it off, send it out, learn something new, some perhaps very new, and then we'll be able to be reincorporated into the original. Will it have changed so much that it can't really be done? Is that possible or is it not? And you could carry this to its limit as I saw one of your videos the other night that suggested that it”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think more interesting is just think about that case. When you have many AIs, will they help each other the way cultural evolution works in people Let's just maybe we should talk about that Bitter lesson, oh who cares about that? That's that's an empirical observation about a particular period in history, 70 years in history, no longer doesn't necessarily have to apply the next 70 years.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way alpha zero was an improvement it did not use the human knowledge just went from experience. So why do you say? Bring in other agents' expertise to teach it. It's worked so well from experience and not by help from another agent.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure your idea makes sense because it seems to presume the existence of AGI And then we've already worked that out.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And fitting into my worldview. And so this has led me where I am, where I am is I'm in some sense a contrarian or someone thinking differently from the field is. And I am personally just kind of content being out of sync with my field for a long period of time, perhaps decades, because occasionally I have improved right in the past. And the other thing I do to help me not feel I'm out of sync and thinking in a strange way is to look not at my local environment or my local field, but to look back in time into history and to see what people have thought classically about the mind in many different fields. And I don't feel I'm out of sync with larger traditions. I really view myself as a classicist rather than as a contrarian. I go to what the larger community of thinkers about the mind have always thought”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It made sense. It wasn't surprising in that sense. AlphaGo actually didn't use TD learning. It waited to see the final outcomes. But alpha zero used TD and AlphaZero was applied to all the other games and did extremely well. I've always been very impressed by the way Alpha Zero plays chess because I'm a chess player and it just sacrifices material for sort of positional advantages. And it's just content and patient to sacrifice that material for a long period of time. And so that was surprising that it worked so well, but also gratifying.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the whole alpha GO thing has a precursor, which is TD gamma and Jerry Tessaro did exactly Reinforcement learning, temporal difference learning methods to Play backgammon. And it beat the world's best players. And it worked really well. And so, in some sense, AlphaGo was merely a scaling up of that process, but it was quite a bit of scaling up, and there was also an additional innovation in how the search was done”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think the weak methods have just totally won. That's, you know, that's the biggest question from the old days of AI. What would happen? And learning and search have just won the day. But there's a sense which that was not surprising to me because I was always voting for or hoping or rooting for the simple basic principles. And so even with the large language models, it's surprising how well it worked, but it was all good and gratifying. In things like AlphaGo, it's sort of surprising how well that was able to work. And Alpha Zero in particular, how well it was able to work. But it's all very gratifying because, again, it's simple basic principles are winning the day.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so yeah, I thought a little bit about this. There are many things or a handful of things. First, the large land models are surprising. It's surprising how effective neural networks, artificial neural networks are at language tasks. That was a surprise, wasn't expected. Language seemed different. So that's impressive. There's a longstanding controversy in AI about simple basic principle methods, the general purpose methods like search and learning and compared to human enabled systems like symbolic methods. And so in the old days, it was interesting because things like search and learning were called weak methods because they just use general principles. They're not using the power that comes from imbuing a system with human knowledge. So those are called strong.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there's nothing in them which will cause it to generalize well. Creating dissent will cause them to find a solution to the problems they've seen. And if there's only one way to solve them, they'll do that. But there are many ways to solve it, some which generalize well, some which generalize poorly. There's nothing in them, in the algorithms that will cause them to generalize well. But people, of course, are involved. And if it's not working out, they fiddle with it.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting a bunch of things right, rhapsody that they don't need to generalize to get them right because the only way to get some of them right is to form something which gets all of them right. So, you know, if there's only one answer and you find it, that's not called generalization. It's the only way to solve it. And so they find the only way to solve it. Generalization is when it could be this way, it could have been that way, and they do it the good way.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, large language mars, so complex. We don't really know what information they had prior. We have to guess because they've been fed so much. This is one reason why they're not a good way to do science. Just so uncontrolled, so unknown.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So generalization always will happen, but we need algorithms that will cause the generalization to be good rather than bad.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Researchers did it because there's no other explanation. Gradient descent will not make you generalize well. It will make you solve the problem. Will not make you get new data. You generalize in a good way. Generalization means train on one thing that'll affect what you do on other things. So we know deep learning is really bad at this. For example, we know that if you train on some new thing, it will often catastrophically interfere with all the old things that you knew. This is exactly bad generalization. Generalization, as I said, is some kind of Influence of training on one state on other states, and generalization is not necessarily good or bad, right? Just the fact that you generalize is not necessarily good or bad. You can generalize poorly, you can generalize well.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, good, good. We're not seeing transfer anywhere. We're not seeing general critical to good performance is that you can generalize well from one state to another state. We don't have any methods that are good at that. What we have are people try different things and they settle on something that a representation. Transfers well, or the generalized as well. But we don't have any automated techniques to promote. We have very few automated techniques to promote transfer, and none of them are used in modern deep learning.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They just set it up. It was not their ambition to have one agent across those games. We want to talk about transfer, we should talk about transfer, not across games or across tasks, but transfer between states.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea is totally general. You know, I do use all the time as my canonical example, the idea of an AI agent is like a person. And people in some sense, they have just one world they live in. And that world may involve chess and it may involve Atari Games. But those are not a different task or a different world. Those are different states. They encounter. And so the general idea is not limited at all.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's not learned from reward, it's learned from you did things, you saw what happened. We made that model with the world. That is, it will be learned very richly from all the sensation that you receive, not just from the reward. Has to include the reward as well, but that's a small part of the whole model. Small, crucial part of the whole model.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you watch if that's going up and down and use that to adjust your policy. So those two things. And then there's also the perception component, which is the construction of your state representation, your sense of where you are now. And the fourth one is what we're really getting at most transparently anyway. The fourth one is the transition model of the world. That's why I am uncomfortable just calling everything models because I want to talk about the model of the world, the transition model of the world, your belief that if you do this, what will happen? What will be the consequences of what you do so your physics of the world? But it's not just physics, it's also abstract models. Like, you know, your model of how you traveled from California up to Edmonton for this podcast. That was a model and that's a transition model. And that would be...”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now I want to talk about the bass common model of the agent with the four parts. So we need a policy. The policy says in the situation I'm in, what should I do? We need a value function. The value function is the thing that is learned with TD learning. And the value function produces a number. The number says, how well is it going?”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, maybe we're trying to ask the question it seems like the reward is too small of a thing to do all the learning that we. To do, but of course, we have the sensations, we have all the other information we can learn from. We don't just learn from the reward, we learn from all the data.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say you're just doing regular learning Maybe you're using context because in large language models, all that information has to go into the context window. In continual learning setup, it just goes into the weights.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the crux of this, and I'm not sure The big world hypothesis seems very relevant, and the reason why humans become useful on their job is because they are encountering the particular part of the world. And it can't have been anticipated and can't all have been put in advance. The world is so huge that you can't, the dream, as I see it, the dream of large language models is you can teach the agent everything and it will know everything and it won't have to learn anything online. During its life. Okay. And your examples are all well. Really, you have to because you can, there's a lot you can teach it, but there's all a little idiosyncrasies of the particular life they're leading and the particular people they're working with. And what they like as opposed to what average people like.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so we have this long term 10 year goal of making a startup and making a lot of money. And so when we make progress, we say, oh, I'm more likely to achieve the long-term goal. And that rewards the steps along the way.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is something we know very well. And it's the basis of it is temporal difference learning. The same thing happens in a less grandiose scale, like when you learn to play chess, you have the long-term goal is winning the game, and yet you want to be able to learn from shorter-term things like taking your opponent's pieces. And so you do that by having a value function which predicts the long-term outcome. And then if you take guys' pieces with your prediction about the long-term outcome is changed, it goes up, you think you're going to win, and then that increase in your belief immediately, quote, reinforces the move that led to taking the piece.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like the word model when used the way you just did. I think a better word would be the network. So I think you mean the The network. Maybe there's many networks. So, anyway, things would be learned, and then you'd have copies and many instances, and sure, you'd want to share knowledge across the instances. And there would be lots of possibilities for doing that. Like there is not today. You can't have one child grow up and learn about the world. And then every new child has to repeat that process. Whereas with AIs, with the digital intelligence, you could hope to do it once and then copy it into the next one as a starting place. So, this would be a huge savings, and I think actually it would be much more important than trying to learn from people.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reward function is arbitrary. And so if you're playing chess, it's to win the game of chess. If you were to do with getting nuts. Right. Um General for an animal, you would say the reward is to avoid pain and to acquire pleasure. And there's also would be a component having to do with, I think there would be, should be a component having to do with your increasing understanding of your environment that would be sort of an intrinsic motivation”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not future. Of course, they exist all the time. This is what reinforcement learning paradigm is, learning from experience.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So learning then is from the stream, and learning is about the stream. So that second part is particularly telling. What you learn, your knowledge, your knowledge is about the stream. Your knowledge is about if you do some action, what will happen, or it's about which events will follow other events. It's about the stream, the content of the knowledge is statements about the stream. And so because it's a statement about the stream, you can test it by comparing it to the stream and you can learn it continually.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It says that experience, action, sensation, well, sensation, action, reward, and this happens on and on and on makes our life, it says that this is the foundation and the focus of intelligence. Intelligence is about taking that stream and altering the actions to increase the rewards in the stream.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think about it the same way It's a small thing on top of basic trial and error learning. Prediction learning. And that's what distinguishes us. From many animals. We're an animal first. And we were an animal before we had language and all those other things”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I like the way you consider that obvious because I consider the opposite obvious. Yeah, I think we need to understand how we are animals. And if we understood a squirrel, I think we'd be almost all the way there. It's understanding human intelligence. The language part is just a small veneer on the surface Okay, so this is great. We're finding out the very different ways that we're thinking We're not arguing. We're trying to share our different ways of thinking with each other.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why are you trying to distinguish humans? Humans are animals. What we have in common is more interesting. What we have, what distinguished us we should be paying less attention to.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Behavior. What we have is examples of things that happen. One thing that followed another, and we have examples of we did something and there were consequences. But there are no examples of supervised learning. Supervised learning is not something that happens in nature. And, you know, school, even if that was the case, you know, we should forget about it because it's just that's some special thing that happens in people. It doesn't happen broadly in nature. And, you know, squirrels don't go to school. Squirrels can learn all about the world. It's absolutely obvious, I would say, that supervised learning doesn't happen in animals.”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I don't think learning is really about training. I think learning is about learning. It's about an active process. The child tries things and sees what happens Yeah, it does not. We don't think we don't think about training when we think of an infant growing up. These things are actually rather well understood. If you go to look about how psychologists think about learning, there's nothing like imitation. Maybe there are some extreme cases where humans might do that or appear to do that, but there's no basic animal learning process called imitation. The basic animal learning processes for prediction and for trial and error control. I mean, it's really interesting how sometimes the most hardest things to see are the obvious ones. It's obvious if you just look at animals and how they learn and you look at psychology and how our theories of them, it's obvious that supervised learning is not part of the way animals learn. We don't have examples of desired”
2025-09-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source