Often referenced by Ben Thompson as one of the canonical tech blog posts.
Core section
We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run. The bitter lesson is based on the historical observations that
- AI researchers have often tried to build knowledge into their agents
- this always helps in the short term, and is personally satisfying to the researcher, but
- in the long run it plateaus and even inhibits further progress, and
- breakthrough progress eventually arrives by an opposing approach based on scaling computation by search and learning.
The eventual success is tinged with bitterness, and often incompletely digested, because it is success over a favored, human-centric approach.
I think about this a lot right now re: Waymo v. Tesla.
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