The Dot and the Swarm: Benefitting from the Bitter Lesson

Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:

I generally think I have done a good job anticipating the direction and pace of AI over the few years I have been writing this Substack, but I think I recently got something fairly large wrong. In the last year I have been posting about how I suspected that humans would have to approach working with agents as a manager, deciding how to delegate work to agents and specifying how those agents should be organized. I thought that getting agents to work effectively as a group would take careful construction, akin to building a company, and that this would take time to figure out.

Nope.

I fell prey to The Bitter Lesson, the hard truth, learned over and over again, that things that we thought required elaborate human rules and thinking can be solved with the brute force of better machine learning systems and more AI. The Bitter Lesson is everywhere among AI startups and companies adopting AI.

More here.

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