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Dwarkesh Patel: belief

26 Sept 2025 Dwarkesh Podcast Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

“In both the case of learning from imitation versus experience and on the question of goals, I think there’s some interesting analogies.”

— Dwarkesh Patel

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Dwarkesh Patel
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
26 Sept 2025
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

Transcript context

…The scalable method is you learn from experience. You try things, you see what works. No one has to tell you. First of all, you have a goal. Without a goal, there’s no sense of right or wrong or better or worse. Large language models are trying to get by without having a goal or a sense of better or worse. That’s just exactly starting in the wrong place. Maybe it’s interesting to compare this to humans. In both the case of learning from imitation versus experience and on the question of goals, I think there’s some interesting analogies. Kids will initially learn from imitation. You don’t think so? No, of course not.…

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