Episode
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end
Dwarkesh Podcast · Sep 26, 2025 · 1 h 06 min
Richard Sutton is the father of reinforcement learning, winner of the 2024 Turing Award, and author of The Bitter Lesson. And he thinks LLMs are a dead end. After interviewing him, my steel man of Richard’s position is this: LLMs aren’t capable of learning on-the-job, so no matter how much we scale, we’ll need some new architecture to enable continual learning. And once we have it, we won’t need…