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What Richard Sutton thinks about neural networks

@richard-sutton · 25 positions · 0 changes of mind

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.

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2 dated positions, 2025, in their own words. Our reading of what Richard Sutton has said — not written or endorsed by them.

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  1. Our readingWe have almost no automated techniques for making a system transfer what it learns, and none of the few we have are used in modern deep learning.

    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

  3. Our readingDeep learning generalises badly, and catastrophic interference with what a network already knew is the proof of it.

    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