The Bitter Wall

We all know the Bitter Lesson. It basically says that as models get smarter, our instructions telling them how to accomplish things will look increasingly stupid compared to what they can do by themselves.📚 Richard Sutton's 2019 essay: general methods that scale with computation beat the human knowledge we try to build into AI.I'm a huge believer in this. It's how I design my harness, and it's how I train people to use AI.But there's a fundamental limitation to the Bitter Lesson. It doesn't matter how smart a person or an AI is if it doesn't know what you want.The alien architect Let's say you want to build the perfect house for yourself, and you have an alien architect in front of you. He's 1,000 times smarter than any human architect, and he can design and build pretty much anything.So he asks you, "What would you like me to build?"And you say, "A nice house."And he says, "No, I can build anything. Tell me exactly what you want."And because you're not very good at communicating, you…

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