Episode
The Bitter Lesson: The history of reinforcement learning
CoRecursive: Coding Stories · Jun 13, 2026 · 1 h 00 min
I've been trying to understand how machine learning actually works. Not use it, understand it, down to the ifs and loops. How does a program built out of plain conditionals get better on its own? So late one night I sent Don a paper. Three words in the title: reward is enough. The claim is that all of intelligence, the whole thing, comes down to a system maximizing a reward. Don thought that was…