Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

> Contrast with the way a human learns skills - as we gain experience with a skill, we get better at understanding when it's the right tool for the job. Which is precisely why Richard Sutton doesn't think LLMs will evolve to AGI[0]. LLMs are based on mimicry, not experience, so it's more likely (according to Sutton) that AGI will be based on some form of RL (reinforcement learning) and not neural networks (LLMs). More specifically, LLMs don't have goals and consequences of actions, which is the foundation for intelligence. So, to your point, the idea of a "skill" is more akin to a reference manual, than it is a skill building exercise that can be applied to developing an instrument, task, solution, etc. [0] [this video]

Geoffrey Hinton's recent lecture at the Royal Institute[1] is a fascinating watch. His assertion that human use of language being exactly analogous to neural networks with back-propagation really made me think about what LLMs might be able to do, and indeed, what happens in me when I "think". A common objection to LLM "intelligence" is that "they don't know anything". But in turn... what do biological intelligences "know"? For example, I "know" how to do things like write constructs that make complex collections of programmable switches behave in certain ways, but what do I really "understand"? I've been "taught" things about quantum mechanics, electrons, semiconductors, transistors, integrated circuits, instruction sets, symbolic logic, state machines, assembly, compilers, high-level-languages, code modules, editors and formatting. I've "learned" more along the way by trial and error. But have I in effect ended up with anything other than an internalised store of concepts and interconnections? (c.f. features and weights). Richard Sutton takes a different view in an interview with Dwarkesh Patel[2] and asserts that "learning" must include goals and reward functions but his argument seemed less concrete and possibly just a semantic re-labelling. [1] [link] [2] [this video]