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The Bitter Lesson

by Rich Sutton

Rich Sutton's 1,100-word argument that seventy years of AI research teach one lesson: general methods that scale with computation — search and learning — eventually beat systems built on human knowledge, from Deep Blue in 1997 to Go, speech recognition and vision. Written in 2019, it became the founding text of the scaling era; read it for the argument and for how uncomfortable it still is.