Evidence receipt / evaluation
Published · transcript-backedRichard Sutton: evaluation
26 Sept 2025 Dwarkesh Podcast Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end
“What is intelligence? The problem is to understand your world. Reinforcement learning is about understanding your world, whereas large language models are about mimicking people, doing what people say you should do.”
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- Speaker
- Richard Sutton
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 26 Sept 2025
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
Transcript context
…First question. My audience and I are familiar with the LLM way of thinking about AI. Conceptually, what are we missing in terms of thinking about AI from the RL perspective? It’s really quite a different point of view. It can easily get separated and lose the ability to talk to each other. Large language models have become such a big thing, generative AI in general a big thing. Our field is subject to bandwagons and fashions, so we lose track of the basic things. I consider reinforcement learning to be basic AI. What is intelligence? The problem is to understand your world. Reinforcement learning is about understanding your world, whereas large language models are about mimicking people, doing what people say you should do. They’re not about figuring out what to do. You would think that to emulate the trillions of tokens in the corpus of Internet text, you would have to build a world model. In fact, these models do seem to have very robust world models. They’re the best world models we’ve made to date in AI, right? What do you think is missing?…
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