The Bitter Lesson: general methods that leverage computation win

In his essay “The Bitter Lesson,” published on March 13, 2019, Richard Sutton writes that “the biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin.” He argues that approaches built on hand-coded human knowledge tend to be overtaken by simpler methods, such as search and learning, that scale with cheaper computing power.