What Richard Sutton thinks about reinforcement learning
Computer scientist who founded the field of reinforcement learning, co-author of the standard textbook, and winner of the 2024 Turing Award.
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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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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 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