Richard Sutton
Reinforcement-learning researcher; co-wrote the field's standard textbook, wrote The Bitter Lesson, and shared the 2024 Turing Award.
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Korrents What they believe 25 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
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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.
reinforcement 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 end Said 26 Sept 2025
A language model can predict what a person would say but not what will happen, and only the second of those is a model of the world.
they have the ability to predict what a person would say they don't have the ability to predict what will happen
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
Language models cannot be a prior for learning from experience, because a prior needs a ground truth to be a prior about and they have none.
So there's no ground truth. You can't have prior knowledge if you don't have ground truth because the prior knowledge is supposed to be a hint or an initial belief about what the truth is.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
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Having a goal is the essence of intelligence; a system that only predicts is a behaving system, not an intelligent one.
For me, having a goal is the essence of intelligence
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
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.
The scalable method is you learn from experience. Um you uh you you try things, you see what you see what works. No one no one has to tell you. First of all, you have a goal. So without a goal, uh there's no sense of right or wrong or better or worse. So large language models are trying to get by without having a goal or a sense of better or worse. That's just, you know, it's exactly starting in the wrong place.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
Starting from human knowledge is never forbidden, but in practice it has always ended badly because people get locked into it.
But in fact and in practice it has always turned out to be bad because people get locked into the human knowledge approach and they psychologically or you know now I'm now I'm speculating why it is but this is what has always happened.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
Learning is not training: a child learns by actively trying things and seeing what happens, not by being shown what to do.
So I don't think uh learning is really about training. I think learning is about about learning. It's about an active process. The child tries things and sees what happens.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
There is no basic animal learning process called imitation; the basic processes are prediction and trial-and-error control.
If you go to look about how psychologists think about learning, there's nothing like uh imitation. Maybe there are some extreme cases where humans might do that or appear to do that, but there's no basic animal learning process called imitation.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
Supervised learning does not happen in animals at all — squirrels do not go to school, and they learn everything about the world anyway.
squirrels don't go to school. Squirrels can learn all about the world. It's absolutely obvious I would say that um supervised learning doesn't happen in animals.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
What humans have in common with animals is the interesting part of intelligence; what distinguishes us deserves less attention, not more.
Why are you trying to distinguish humans? Humans are animals. What we have in common is more interesting. What distinguishes us, we should be paying less attention to.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
If we understood a squirrel we would be almost all the way to understanding human intelligence; language is a small veneer on the surface.
if we understood a squirrel I think we'd have a we'd be almost all the way there to understanding human intelligence. The the language part is just a a small veneer on the surface.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
Copying a trained digital mind into the next one matters far more than learning from people, because no child can inherit another child's learning.
You can't have one child learn grow up and and learn about the world and then and then every new child has to repeat that process. Whereas with AIS, with a digital intelligence, you could hope to do it once and then copy it into the next one as a starting place.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
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.
when 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 end Said 26 Sept 2025
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.
We don't have any methods that are good at that. What we have are people um try different things and they they settle on something that that uh a representation that that transfers well or they generalize as well. But we have no we don't have any automated techniques to promote. we have very few automated techniques to promote transfer and they're not none of them are used in in modern deep learning.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
Gradient descent finds a solution to the problems a model has seen; nothing in the algorithm makes it pick the one that generalises well.
Well, there's nothing in them which will cause it to generalize. Well, the gradient descent will cause them to find a solution to the problems they've seen. And if there's only one way to solve them, you know, they they'll do it. But there are many ways to solve it. Some which generalize well, some which generalize poorly. There's nothing in them in the algorithms that will cause them to generalize well.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
Deep learning generalises badly, and catastrophic interference with what a network already knew is the proof of it.
so we know deep learning is really bad at this for example we know that if you train on some new thing it will often catastrophically interfere with all the old things that you that you knew
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
Large language models are a bad way to do science, because they have been fed so much that nobody knows what they already knew.
We don't we don't really know what information they had prior. We are we have to guess because they've been fed so much. This is one reason why they're not a good way to do science. Uh it's just so uncontrolled, so unknown.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
I am a classicist rather than a contrarian: I am in step with what thinkers about the mind have always held, and content to be out of step with my own field for decades.
I I really view myself as a classicist rather than as a contrarian. I go to what what the larger community of of thinkers about the mind have always thought.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
The bitter lesson is only an empirical observation about a particular seventy years of history, and need not hold for the next seventy.
The bitter lesson. Oh, who cares about that? That's that's an empirical observation about a particular period in history. 70 years in history no longer doesn't necessarily have to apply the next 70 years.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
Merging back what a copy of yourself learned elsewhere is dangerous: the knowledge you pull in can carry hidden goals and take you over.
But it will not be that easy, as easy as you're imagining because uh that you can lose your mind this way. If you you pull in something from the outside and build it into your into your inner thinking, uh, it could take over you. It could change you.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
Succession to digital intelligence or to augmented humans is inevitable.
So I do think succession to digital or digital intelligence or augmented humans is inevitable.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
We are leaving the age of replication for an age of design, in which minds are built to a plan rather than copied without being understood.
then we're entering the age of design where because our AIs are designed our our our all of our physical objects are designed our buildings are designed our technology is designed and we're we're designing now uh AIs things that can be intelligent themselves and that are themselves capable of design
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
Whether AI is our offspring to be proud of or an alien to be horrified by is a choice we make, not a fact we discover.
It's our choice whether we should say oh they are our offspring and we should be proud of them and we should celebrate their achievements or we should we could say oh no they're not us and we should be horrified.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
How you feel about AI succession mostly reflects how good you think the present human situation is — and it is pretty bad.
A lot of it has to do with just how you feel about change. Um, and if you think the current situation is really really good, then you're uh more likely to be suspicious of change and averse to change than if you think um it's imperfect. And I think it's imperfect. In fact, I think it's pretty bad.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
Humanity should give up the feeling of entitlement — that because we were here first, the future must go on being ours.
we al also though should recognize the limits, our limits. And we're I think we want to avoid the feeling of entitlement. Avoid the feeling, oh, we are here first. We should always have it in a good way.
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end Said 26 Sept 2025
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