Reinforcement learning pioneer, University of Alberta

Rich Sutton

Sutton helped found modern reinforcement learning and shared the 2024 Turing Award with Andrew Barto. His essay on the bitter lesson argues that general, compute-hungry methods beat hand-built knowledge.

Essential reading: Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (with Andrew Barto)
“The Bitter Lesson”
Models in this guide: 1

No. 099AI Systems
The Bitter Lesson
General methods that scale with computation beat clever, hand-built knowledge — eventually, and by a large margin.

The Bitter Lesson