Richard Sutton quote, Sep 26, 2025

Professor, University of Alberta · Sep 26, 2025 · Interview, Dwarkesh Podcast: Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

Large language models are trying to get by without having a goal or a sense of better or worse. That’s just exactly starting in the wrong place.

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Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

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Sep 26, 2025	I do think succession to digital intelligence or augmented humans is inevitable.Sep 26, 2025· Interview	InterviewDwarkesh Podcast: Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end	Source
Sep 26, 2025	I think we should be proud that we are giving rise to this great transition in the universe.Sep 26, 2025· Interview	InterviewDwarkesh Podcast: Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end	Source
Sep 26, 2025	In which case, it will be another instance of the bitter lesson, that the things that used human knowledge were eventually superseded by things that just trained from experience and computation.Sep 26, 2025· Interview	InterviewDwarkesh Podcast: Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end	Source
Sep 26, 2025	What we want, to quote Alan Turing, is a machine that can learn from experience, where experience is the things that actually happen in your life.Sep 26, 2025· Interview	InterviewDwarkesh Podcast: Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end	Source

Date	Quote	Context	Source
Sep 24, 2026	An AI with more real layers can actually be “smarter” in the conventional sense of the term.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post	PostThe Specter Of Neuralese	Source
Sep 24, 2026	For 100 steps in a row, the AI can shoot delicate subtle ideas from layer to layer at the speed of light. Then there’s one step where it has to encode them into twenty-six glyphs invented by Phoenician turquoise miners in 1800 BC. Then it has to re-encode the Phoenician glyphs into delicate subtle lightspeed ideas before it can do anything else.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post	PostThe Specter Of Neuralese	Source
Sep 24, 2026	The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post	PostThe Specter Of Neuralese	Source
Sep 23, 2026	This trains the AIs to be focused on task success, which naturally risks including things like reward-hacking, cheating, and single-minded pursuit of stated goals at the expense of ethical injunctions.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post	PostMysteries Of AI Generalization	Source
Sep 19, 2026	It is important to not confuse massive steps in inference-time scaling, a dynamic which should be fairly predictable, with being the outputs of RSI, which is highly uncertain.Nathan LambertSep 19, 2026· Post	PostWhy I still haven't bought into true RSI	Source
Sep 17, 2026	If you have five hours, you’re probably going to do a lot better. The AI models are pretty similar.Noam BrownSep 17, 2026· Interview	InterviewDwarkesh Podcast: Agent swarms, alignment, and recursive self-improvement	Source

About this quote

Said by: Richard Sutton, Professor, University of Alberta
Where: Dwarkesh Podcast: Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end
Topics: Research
Company: University of Alberta
Source: dwarkesh.com/p/richard-sutton

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