Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

The interview that detonated AI Twitter. Fresh off the Turing Award, Sutton tells Dwarkesh Patel that large language models cannot learn on the job, cannot predict the world, cannot be surprised — and therefore cannot be the path. Patel pushes back from inside the scaling worldview, and for an hour the two talk past each other in the most instructive way possible: what you are hearing is the field’s deepest fault line, between intelligence as imitation of human text and intelligence as experience. Sutton’s verdict afterward: “a frank exchange of views.”