Evidence receipt / preference
Published · transcript-backedRichard Sutton: preference
26 Sept 2025 Dwarkesh Podcast Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end
“I like John McCarthy’s definition that intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Richard Sutton
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- preference
- Recorded
- 26 Sept 2025
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
Transcript context
…Isn’t that literally what next token prediction is? Prediction about what’s next and then updating on the surprise? The next token is what they should say, what the actions should be. It’s not what the world will give them in response to what they do. Let’s go back to their lack of a goal. For me, having a goal is the essence of intelligence. Something is intelligent if it can achieve goals. I like John McCarthy’s definition that intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals. You have to have goals or you’re just a behaving system. You’re not anything special, you’re not intelligent. You agree that large language models don’t have goals? No, they have a goal.…
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