Richard Sutton: Brute Force Compute Isn't Enough for Intelligence, Igniting Debate
josephdviviano · x · 2026-11-08
- Richard Sutton (RL pioneer) argued that brute force computation alone is not enough for intelligence — clever new methods are needed, and the science of AI is far from finished.
- @TarunKathuria agreed, noting critics seem to forget that before reasoning models, nearly everyone (including Dwarkesh Patel on his Sutton podcast) believed pretraining-only scaling would yield PhD-level math models — until reasoning models shattered that ceiling.
- The poster argues Sutton is right and that critics misunderstand The Bitter Lesson.
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