Richard Sutton
Computer scientist who founded the field of reinforcement learning, co-author of the standard textbook, and winner of the 2024 Turing Award.
Richard Sutton did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsWhy are you trying to distinguish humans? Humans are animals. What we have in common is more interesting. What distinguishes us, we should be paying less attention to.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 1st of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsreinforcement learning is about understanding your world whereas large language models are about mimicking people doing what people say you should do. They're not about figuring out what to do.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 2nd of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsthey have the ability to predict what a person would say they don't have the ability to predict what will happen
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 3rd of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsSo there's no ground truth. You can't have prior knowledge if you don't have ground truth because the prior knowledge is supposed to be a hint or an initial belief about what the truth is.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 4th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsFor me, having a goal is the essence of intelligence
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 5th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsBut in fact and in practice it has always turned out to be bad because people get locked into the human knowledge approach and they psychologically or you know now I'm now I'm speculating why it is but this is what has always happened.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 6th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsThe scalable method is you learn from experience. Um you uh you you try things, you see what you see what works. No one no one has to tell you. First of all, you have a goal. So without a goal, uh there's no sense of right or wrong or better or worse. So large language models are trying to get by without having a goal or a sense of better or worse. That's just, you know, it's exactly starting in the wrong place.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 7th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsSo I don't think uh learning is really about training. I think learning is about about learning. It's about an active process. The child tries things and sees what happens.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 8th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsIf you go to look about how psychologists think about learning, there's nothing like uh 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.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 9th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordssquirrels don't go to school. Squirrels can learn all about the world. It's absolutely obvious I would say that um supervised learning doesn't happen in animals.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 10th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsif we understood a squirrel I think we'd have a we'd be almost all the way there to understanding human intelligence. The the language part is just a a small veneer on the surface.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 11th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsYou can't have one child learn grow up and and learn about the world and then and then every new child has to repeat that process. Whereas with AIS, with a digital intelligence, you could hope to do it once and then copy it into the next one as a starting place.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 12th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordswhen you learn to play chess you have the grand the long-term goal is winning the game and yet you you can't you um you want to be able to learn from shorter term things like you know taking the your opponent's pieces um and so you do that by having a value function which predicts the long-term outcome
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 13th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsWe don't have any methods that are good at that. What we have are people um try different things and they they settle on something that that uh a representation that that transfers well or they generalize as well. But we have no we don't have any automated techniques to promote. we have very few automated techniques to promote transfer and they're not none of them are used in in modern deep learning.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 14th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsso 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 that you knew
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 15th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsWe don't we don't really know what information they had prior. We are 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. Uh it's just so uncontrolled, so unknown.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 16th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsWell, there's nothing in them which will cause it to generalize. Well, the gradient descent will cause them to find a solution to the problems they've seen. And if there's only one way to solve them, you know, they they'll do it. 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.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 17th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsI I really view myself as a classicist rather than as a contrarian. I go to what what the larger community of of thinkers about the mind have always thought.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 18th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsThe 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.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 19th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsBut it will not be that easy, as easy as you're imagining because uh that you can lose your mind this way. If you you pull in something from the outside and build it into your into your inner thinking, uh, it could take over you. It could change you.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 20th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsSo I do think succession to digital or digital intelligence or augmented humans is inevitable.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 21st of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsthen we're entering the age of design where because our AIs are designed our our our all of our physical objects are designed our buildings are designed our technology is designed and we're we're designing now uh AIs things that can be intelligent themselves and that are themselves capable of design
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 22nd of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsIt'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 should we could say oh no they're not us and we should be horrified.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 23rd of 25 in this recording
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Their wordsA lot of it has to do with just how you feel about change. Um, and if you think the current situation is really really good, then you're uh more likely to be suspicious of change and averse to change than if you think um it's imperfect. And I think it's imperfect. In fact, I think it's pretty bad.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 24th of 25 in this recording
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Their wordswe al also though should recognize the limits, our limits. And we're I think we want to avoid the feeling of entitlement. Avoid the feeling, oh, we are here first. We should always have it in a good way.
↗Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endyoutube.com 25th of 25 in this recording