What are the real problems of continual learning?

Reflections on catastrophic interference, plasticity, and learning for the future in the era of large language models

What are the real problems of continual learning? Reflections on catastrophic interference, plasticity, and learning for the future in the era of large language models Andrew Lampinen May 29, 2026 61 8 4 Share Lately, there’s been a surge of interest in continual learning . In particular, there’s been an increasing sense that continual learning is one of the areas where the gap between humans and AI is largest. 1 In this post, I want to explain what continual learning is, and some of the past perspectives on it — including how I think the field focused on what in retrospect turned out to be th

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