Why We Lack Transfer in RL Today

Richard Sutton is the father of reinforcement learning, winner of the 2024 Turing Award, and author of The Bitter Lesson. And he thinks LLMs are a dead end.

After interviewing him, my steel man of Richard’s position is this: LLMs aren’t capable of learning on-the-job, so no matter how much we scale, we’ll need some new architecture to enable continual learning.

And once we have it, we won’t need a special training phase — the agent will just learn on-the-fly, like all humans, and indeed, like all animals.

This new paradigm will render our current approach with LLMs obsolete.

In our interview, I did my best to represent the view that LLMs might function as the foundation on which experiential learning can happen… Some sparks flew.

A big thanks to the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute for inviting me up to Edmonton and for letting me use their studio and equipment.

Enjoy!

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) – Are LLMs a dead end?

(00:13:04) – Do humans do imitation learning?

(00:23:10) – The Era of Experience

(00:33:39) – Current architectures generalize poorly out of distribution

(00:41:29) – Surprises in the AI field

(00:46:41) – Will The Bitter Lesson still apply post AGI?

(00:53:48) – Succession to AIs