What is Bitter Lesson?
Rich Sutton's 2019 essay: general methods that scale with computation ultimately beat methods built on hand-coded human knowledge. For products, it warns that workarounds for today's model limits tend to get thrown away.
more fuel · plain engine ends ahead
The Bitter Lesson argues that, over time…
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In real work
Citing the bitter lesson, the PM declined a quarter of hand-written parsing rules and spent it on evals that show the moment a new model parses the forms unaided.
In the illustration
Both engines get more fuel each second. The hand-tuned one, built around a small custom carburetor, leads early and then flattens; the plain one keeps using the extra fuel and its curve crosses above.
Apply the bitter lesson in your model to the roadmap below: mark each item as riding model progress or fighting it, and suggest how to shrink the items that fight it.
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