Ben Goertzel: the common framing of the 'bitter lesson' is 'quite stupid'
bengoertzel · x · 2026-11-01
AI researcher and SingularityNET founder Ben Goertzel argues the popular formulation of the "bitter lesson" is "quite stupid." While AlphaZero is brute-force-ish, he notes it was also genuine algorithmic and architectural innovation—not something any CS undergrad with a big computer could trivially replicate with standard RL.
He draws an analogy to brains: yes, biological intelligence needs many cells, but cell count alone isn't the secret—architecture and many well-honed particulars matter too. The fact that hand-engineering a tiny brain fails doesn't imply scale is the whole story.
His core point: a necessary condition is not a sufficient condition—compute/scale may be necessary, but the popular narrative conflates the two.
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