The Bitter Lesson: A Paradox in AI Development

Rich Sutton's "bitter lesson" posits that general methods leveraging computation are ultimately the most effective. This article explores this idea's manifestation in fields like Go, chess, speech recognition, and computer vision, and its challenges in enterprise applications. While massive computation yields breakthroughs in some areas, the article highlights limitations in data quality and clearly defined objectives, arguing that efficient specialized models sometimes outperform general-purpose ones, and that computational resources aren't always the optimal solution.