Richard Sutton: evaluation

Transcript context

…I want to zoom out and ask about being in the field of AI for longer than almost anybody who is commentating on it, or working in it now. I’m curious about what the biggest surprises have been. How much new stuff do you feel like is coming out? Or does it feel like people are just playing with old ideas? Zooming out, you got into this even before deep learning was popular. So how do you see the trajectory of this field over time and how new ideas have come about and everything? What’s been surprising? I thought a little bit about this. There are a handful of things. First, the large language models are surprising. It’s surprising how effective artificial neural networks are at language tasks. That was a surprise, it wasn’t expected. Language seemed different. So that’s impressive. There’s a long-standing controversy in AI about simple basic principle methods, the general-purpose methods like search and learning, compared to human-enabled systems like symbolic methods. In the old days, it was interesting because things like search and learning were called weak methods because they’re just using general principles, they’re not using the power that comes from imbuing a system with human knowledge. Those were called strong. I think the weak methods have just totally won. That’s the biggest question from the old days of AI, what would happen. Learning and search have just won the day. There’s a sense in which that was not surprising to me because I was always hoping or rooting for the simple basic principles. Even with the large language models, it’s surprising how well it worked, but it was all good and gratifying. AlphaGo was surprising, how well that was able to work, AlphaZero in particular. But it’s all very gratifying because again, simple basic principles are winning the day. Whenever the public conception has been changed because some new application was developed— for example, when AlphaZero became this viral sensation—to you as somebody who has literally came up with many of the techniques that were used, did it feel to you like new breakthroughs were made? Or did it feel like, “Oh, we’ve had these techniques since the ‘90s and people are simply combining them and applying them now”?…

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