Rethinking the Bitter Lesson: 'don't work on things that don't scale,' not 'scale is enough'
gowthami_s · x · 2026-11-09
X user @recurseparadox offers a one-line reinterpretation of Sutton's Bitter Lesson that's been circulating:
> Bitter lesson = don't work on things that don't scale. It was never = scale is enough.
The correction distinguishes two readings: the lesson's core is abandoning approaches that can't ride the compute-scaling wave, not a claim that brute-force scaling alone wins and method research no longer matters.
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