✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

The Bitter Lesson - by Finbarr Timbers

artfintel.com · 999 words · saved by 1 readers

The Bitter Lesson is an excellent essay which is overwhelmingly misunderstood. The point of the bitter lesson is that, over time, methods which scale with compute will outperform methods that do not. It is not: The idea that we should never incorporate human knowledge The idea that deep learning and scale are all we need (Rich is actually relatively skeptical of deep learning) The entire point of the essay is that, in the last 5 decades, we have seen massive increases in the amount of compute available to us as an industry and we expect to continue to see massive increases in the amount of compute available to AI research. Methods which take advantage of compute will benefit, and those that do not will suffer. The reason the lesson is bitter is that it is often much easier and quicker to get results by incorporating human knowledge. If you’re training an autocomplete system in 1995, you’re probably not going to get very far with next token prediction, and instead, handcoded, or statist

The Bitter Lesson Far too many people misunderstand the bitter lesson Finbarr Timbers Jun 26, 2025 44 7 5 Share The Bitter Lesson is an excellent essay which is overwhelmingly misunderstood. The point of the bitter lesson is that, over time, methods which scale with compute will outperform methods that do not. It is not: The idea that we should never incorporate human knowledge The idea that deep learning and scale are all we need (Rich is actually relatively skeptical of deep learning) The entire point of the essay is that, in the last 5 decades, we have seen massive increases in the amount o

Explore this link on the map →

related reading