The Bitter Lesson Conditions

The hard truth of AI is that methods that exploit deep, hard-won human knowledge about a particular domain are outperformed by methods that cleverly exploit the increasing power of computation. I have a modest proposal to distill this fundamental truth into a set of conditions which, when met, will revolutionise a given field. I do not claim this insight about the fundamental mechanism of progress in AI as original; I have been heavily influenced by Richard Sutton's powerful essay The Bitter Lesson. The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin. Sutton is not alone in this observation.