Editorial

The Frontier

Sutton: synthetic data is 'a huge mistake' — LLMs are a quarter of intelligence

Richard Sutton, the reinforcement learning pioneer who wrote the field's most-quoted essay, used a Sequoia Capital interview to take direct aim at the industry's scaling playbook — calling synthetic data "a huge mistake" and arguing large language models capture only about a quarter of what intelligence is. The reinforcement learning pioneer behind "The Bitter Lesson" — the maxim that algorithms and compute beat hand-encoded human knowledge — sat for a Sequoia Capital conversation alongside…