AGI 6
- Succession to digital intelligence or to augmented humans is inevitable.
- Humanity should give up the feeling of entitlement — that because we were here first, the future must go on being ours.
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.
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What Richard Sutton says most about
LLMs 5
- Large language models mimic what people say to do rather than work out what to do, which is why they are not about understanding the world.
- Large language models start in exactly the wrong place, because they try to get by without a goal and therefore without any sense of better or worse.
measuring intelligence 3
- Having a goal is the essence of intelligence; a system that only predicts is a behaving system, not an intelligent one.
- What humans have in common with animals is the interesting part of intelligence; what distinguishes us deserves less attention, not more.
neural networks 2
- We 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.
- Deep learning generalises badly, and catastrophic interference with what a network already knew is the proof of it.
reinforcement learning 2
- Learning from a reward ten years away is a solved problem: a value function trained by temporal-difference learning rewards the steps along the way.
- Large language models mimic what people say to do rather than work out what to do, which is why they are not about understanding the world.