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

In this particular episode, host Dwarkesh Patel interviews Richard Sutton, often dubbed the “father of reinforcement learning.” They discuss Sutton’s views on the current trajectory of large language models (LLMs), why he believes LLMs might be a “dead end” in AI research, and how reinforcement learning (RL) still holds promise for building more generalizable, decision-making systems. The conversation combines deep technical insights with philosophical arguments about AI’s future and the kinds of problems that remain unsolved.