The inventor of the bitter lesson has a bitter lesson for LLM scaling enthusiasts

Turing Award winner Richard Sutton says raw compute alone isn't enough for intelligence and that AI science needs clever new methods and is "far from finished," sparking wide discussion on X. Researchers Jerry Tworek and Jayden Teoh respond that the bitter lesson still holds but is often misread, with Tworek warning that transformer scaling's temporary success "has reward-hacked the brains of a whole generation of scientists." OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei counter that LLM scaling is far from exhausted.