Richard Sutton

But people, of course, are involved.

And if it's not working out, they fiddle with it.

Right.

until they find a way, perhaps until they find a way which it generalizes well.

Okay.

So, yeah, I...

thought a little bit about this.

There are many things, or a handful of things.

First, the large language models are surprising.

It's surprising how effective artificial neural networks are at language tasks.

That was a surprise.

It wasn't expected.

Language seemed different.

So that's impressive.

There's a long-standing controversy in AI about simple basic principle methods, the general-purpose methods like search and learning, compared to human-enabled systems like symbolic methods.

So in the old days, it was interesting because things like search and learning were called weak methods because they just use general principles.

They're not using the power that comes from imbuing a system with human knowledge.

So those were called strong and weak.

And so I think the weak methods have just totally won.

That's the biggest question from the old days of AI.