The Bitter Lesson
Type: Book
As of November 2026, The Bitter Lesson has been mentioned in one podcast episode on Lenny's Podcast (Dec 2025).
The bitter lesson is the observation in artificial intelligence that, in the long run, general approaches that scale with available computational power tend to outperform ones based on domain-specific understanding because they are better at taking advantage of the falling cost of computation over time. The principle was proposed and named in a 2019 essay by Richard Sutton and is now widely accepted.
| Mentioned in | 1 episode on 1 podcast (as of November 2026) |
|---|---|
| First heard | Dec 2025 on Lenny's Podcast |
| Author | Richard S. Sutton |
Who talks about The Bitter Lesson on podcasts?
Lenny Rachitsky brought up The Bitter Lesson; the most recent mention was Dec 2025 on Lenny's Podcast.
- The $1B Al company training ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini on the path to responsible AGI | Edwin Chen on Lenny's Podcast (Dec 2025) — Lenny Rachitsky
What is The Bitter Lesson mentioned alongside?
The Bitter Lesson is most often mentioned alongside tabloids, STEM and linguistics.
Mentioned together: tabloids, STEM, linguistics, blitzscaling, Kevin Weil, Vercel, Lenny's.com, Vanta, Unit test, taste