David Silver and Richard Sutton—two AI heavyweights who’ve been right before—just declared the dawn of the “Era of Experience.” Translation: AI is about to stop begging for your training data and start learning on its own like a rebellious teenager with a library card.
The Bitter Lesson Gets Spicier 🌶️
Sutton’s infamous “Bitter Lesson” argued that brute-force compute beats human-crafted rules. Now, he and Silver are doubling down: future AI won’t just scale—it’ll self-improve by interacting with the world. Think AlphaGo, but with fewer board games and more real-world chaos.
Four Ways AI Will Outgrow Us
- Streams: No more isolated tasks. AI will have lifelong memory, like a chatbot that remembers your cringe takes from 2023.
- Actions: Instead of waiting for prompts, agents will autonomously click, type, and API-spam their way to victory.
- Rewards: Forget human-designed incentives. AI will invent its own—“Congratulations, you optimized ad revenue!”
- Reasoning: Ditch imitation. AI will develop alien logic—think calculus, but hallucinated by a neural net.
Why Enterprises Should Care (Or Panic)
Sutton and Silver casually dropped this bomb: “The agent may use ‘human-friendly’ actions… or ‘machine-friendly’ ones like calling APIs.” Translation? Your app isn’t just for humans anymore. If you’re not building for AI-to-AI interactions, prepare for obsolescence—or worse, a botnet of agents treating your SaaS like a buffet. DeepMind declined to comment, probably because they’re busy teaching an AI to experience existential dread. Meanwhile, the rest of us get to watch as the web becomes a playground for self-improving algorithms. Buckle up. 🚀