As it is, your comment seems to tell me that neural nets are good at neural net things and GOFAI is good at GOFAI things, which is obvious, and is what I'm saying: neural nets can make only very limited use of expert knowledge and so suck in all domains where domain knowledge is abundant and abundantly useful, which are the same domains where GOFAI dominates. GOFAI can make very good use of expert knowledge but is traditionally not as good in domains where only tacit knowledge is available, because we don't understand the domain well enough yet, like in anything to do with pattern recognition, which is the same domains where neural nets dominate. If explicit, expert knowledge was available for those domains, then GOFAI would dominate, and neural nets would fall behind, completely contrary to what Sutton thinks.
So, the bitter lesson is only bitter for those who are not interested in what classical AI systems can do best. For those of us who are, the lesson is sweet indeed: we're making progress, algorithmic progress, progress in understanding, scientific progress, and don't need to burn through thousands of credit to train on server farms to do anything of note. That's even a running joke in my team: hey, do you need any server time? Nah, I'll run the experiment on my laptop over lunch. And then beat the RL algo (PPO) that needs three days training on GPUs. To solve mazes badly.
Hey, og_kalu, I vouched for your comment but it stays dead. It's not you, it was me who was out of line, with my comment: "wishful thinking"; that's not a very polite thing to say. And my original comment was a bit prissy, too.
To be honest, I'm always a bit jumpy around your comments because I've noticed them all over the place and they're often grayed-out. You kind of tend to go for the jugular. I don't mean that as a good thing. I think others have noticed it too and you get more reaction than you should. That's a shame, because it's clear there's lots of interesting conversations to be had, given you have such strong views and you seem to have done quite a bit of reading; though only on one side of things.
Anyway sorry for starting it this time around and that you got dead'ed, I hope we get to disagree more in the future.
As it is, your comment seems to tell me that neural nets are good at neural net things and GOFAI is good at GOFAI things, which is obvious, and is what I'm saying: neural nets can make only very limited use of expert knowledge and so suck in all domains where domain knowledge is abundant and abundantly useful, which are the same domains where GOFAI dominates. GOFAI can make very good use of expert knowledge but is traditionally not as good in domains where only tacit knowledge is available, because we don't understand the domain well enough yet, like in anything to do with pattern recognition, which is the same domains where neural nets dominate. If explicit, expert knowledge was available for those domains, then GOFAI would dominate, and neural nets would fall behind, completely contrary to what Sutton thinks.
So, the bitter lesson is only bitter for those who are not interested in what classical AI systems can do best. For those of us who are, the lesson is sweet indeed: we're making progress, algorithmic progress, progress in understanding, scientific progress, and don't need to burn through thousands of credit to train on server farms to do anything of note. That's even a running joke in my team: hey, do you need any server time? Nah, I'll run the experiment on my laptop over lunch. And then beat the RL algo (PPO) that needs three days training on GPUs. To solve mazes badly.