The bitter lesson in 26 words: Don’t be distracted by human knowledge, as AI has been historically. Instead focus on methods for creating knowledge that scale with computation, like search and learning. [Bitter lesson - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson) LLMs aren't bitter lesson pilled enough. Humans created the architecture, the learning algorithm, the training data, the system prompts, the agentic scaffolds. Even with reinforcement learning, there are also by humans carefully crafted reinforcement learning environments with human crafted rewards (human feedback or symbolic verifiable rewards code or LLM as judge setups with prompts) and tasks. And human crafted tools, bash, compliers, etc. in tool calling. Many people in LLM scaling land praise Sutton for LLMs being bitter lesson pilled while the father of bitter lesson itself himself thinks LLMs are dead end because of all those human biases everywhere in these systems across their development. I would say bitter lesson is a spectrum and LLMs are generally partially bitter lesson pilled, and definitely more than pure expert systems. I think bitter lesson in the limit escapes human biases at all levels. No human handholding anywhere. Even autonomous self play RL systems bootstrapping themselves to superhuman performance are defined by humans at the beginning, their architecture, the learning algorithm, the rewards, the task, the environment, etc., Even if they are slightly more bitter lesson pilled than more by humans hand holded RL approaches. And they don't work in general domains outside of games that much yet. If you take bitter lesson to the limit: Current AI is still definitely far from architecture and learning algorithm itself being selforganized from evolution or something like that. What sensory data to pay attention to and what rewards to pay attention to being inferred by the system. Deciding on its own what open ended things to pursue. How much compute to add to itself. How to self modify itself. Etc. Without human biases. Similar to how nobody designed humans. We emerged from physics, from evolution. We set out goals, not some external agent. Etc.