Draft v3 · · What changed
Richard Sutton
Positions
Sutton and the Bitter Lesson
Richard Sutton wrote "The Bitter Lesson," the 2019 essay scaling's advocates read as a license to scale. His writing since, through the OaK architecture he presented in 2025, argues the question was never whether to…
Sutton against Chollet, on different axes
Sutton and François Chollet both reject the claim that scaling today's language models delivers AGI. They disagree on what is missing: runtime experience for Sutton, compositional generalization for Chollet.
Carmack and Sutton's bet against simulator-only RL
Keen, the Dallas lab Richard Sutton left in June 2026, set a 2030 target for signs of AGI on $20 million raised in 2022, betting on reinforcement learning on real hardware, not language models.
The technical lever the bull case keeps stepping over
A 2024 Nature paper by Dohare, Sutton and colleagues found standard deep networks silently lose the ability to learn under continual training. Scaling's advocates treat that as an engineering problem; Sutton treats it…
·Issue 1 · The Scaling Bet
deslop.media editorial. Issue 1, Draft v3, first published October 10, 2026. Reporting current through October 2026. Use the flags on this page to report an error or a disagreement. Changes to the issue are listed on the changes page.
Part of Issue 1 · The Scaling Bet