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A Look Back at Richard Sutton’s Bitter Lesson in AI

Not that long ago, in a world not far changed from the one we inhabit today, an ambitious project at Dartmouth College aimed to bridge the gap between human and machine intelligence. That was 1956, and while the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence wasn’t the first project to consider the potential of thinking machines, it did give it a name and inaugurated a pantheon of influential researchers. In the proposal put together by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester, the authors lay out ambitions that seem quaint today in their naïve ambition:

“An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.” –A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, 1955

Source: DZone