What fancy things? There's not a single equation in the whole thing. (I don't think this is even using Computer Modern, is it? It looks like a considerably thicker serif, and some of the characters like the lower-case 'g' look different.) Or are you referring to 'having 4 short, simple footnotes' as 'fancy' now? And also the graph makes perfect sense and tracks my own impression of RL history, what are you talking about?
Why not use a blog dot google dot com domain or whatever?
Why choose a format that resembles a published article instead?
As for the graph, it’s too generic, it doesn’t provide any real value, other than a certain pseudo-appeal reminiscent of paper-style visuals. In my humble opinion, it’s designed to mislead people who fall for hype, much like some of Google’s recent pseudo-scientific blog posts on machine learning.
I have deep respect for Sutton and his work, but this kind of things are a hard pass for me.
> Why choose a format that resembles a published article instead?
...It is in a format that resembles a published article because it is going to be a published article? "This is a preprint of a chapter that will appear in the book Designing an Intelligence, published by MIT Press." on the first page.
> As for the graph, it’s too generic
A history of RL from DQN to AlphaProof/LLM computer use in Gemini is not 'generic', and could not be.
> it doesn’t provide any real value
It provides value to people who were not around then and not familiar with how RL attention peaks and crests, and a similar chart about TD-Gammon and Deep Blue, say, would likewise be useful for the many people who did not actually live through those eras, and helps contextualize material from back then. (I did, and maybe you did, and so it's not useful to us, but there exist other, younger people in the world, who are not us{{citation needed}}.) And the fact that these cycles exist is something worth reflecting on - Karpathy and others have reflected on how there were expectations of DRL leading to AGI in the 2015-2020 period, which wound up being swamped by self-supervised learning and DRL relegated to a backwater (and contributed very directly to many major events like how OA and DM became like they are now - and why Sutton is at Keen rather than DM with Silver), but now suddenly becoming super-relevant again.
> ...It is in a format that resembles a published article because it is going to be a published article? "This is a preprint of a chapter that will appear in the book Designing an Intelligence, published by MIT Press." on the first page.
It doesn't make any difference and doesn't invalidate my critique. It appears to be a science communication book, so it could easily be a web page. Even if it was a LaTeXish PDF there were multiple ways to not making it a PDF that resembles a scientific article, there's a precise choice being made about how to communicate.
The medium is the message.
> A history of RL from DQN to AlphaProof/LLM computer use in Gemini is not 'generic', and could not be.
History of RL is not 'generic' and is indeed really interesting, I look forward to reading Sutton's book! But the graph in the PDF is. The y-axis is ill-defined because
1. it combines different technologies (DQN, AlphaGo, GPT models) on a single continuum implying direct comparison.
2. the evergreen hypester future trajectory toward "superhuman intelligence"
I will not comment further on the graph, it's not a interesting visualization in my opinion and only serves the author's purpose for the narrative of "feeling the AGI (through RL)”
There would be more interesting way of plotting this information for a general public.
I agree that is harsh from me that it doesn’t provide value. Maybe it provides value to people who want to explore RL now, but again, the medium is the message, and this format is clearly saying out loud “look at me, I’m a paper, trust me.”
> It doesn't make any difference and doesn't invalidate my critique. It appears to be a science communication book, so it could easily be a web page. Even if it was a LaTeXish PDF there were multiple ways to not making it a PDF that resembles a scientific article, there's a precise choice being made about how to communicate. The medium is the message.
If this is really your response, I agree with your original comment about you being burned-out.
Shifting from addressing the substance to referencing a personal remark like my joke about “burning out” from AI hype doesn't strength your argument. I expected more from someone in “EA/rationalism”. In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised when substantive critique about presentation format gets poisoned with a personal comment rather than discussing the actual points about how scientific information is communicated. The medium is indeed the message. Bye.
