The Bitter Lesson: Theoretical Foundations
ยท 4 min read
In his 2019 essay The Bitter Lesson, Richard Sutton outlined a key observation in AI research: general-purpose methods that leverage massive computation consistently outperform human-crafted, specialized approaches. While this claim has strong empirical support, its theoretical justification is often overlooked. This post explores the fundamental learning theories, computational complexity principles, and optimization frameworks that underpin The Bitter Lesson.