Rich Sutton just published his most important essay on AI since The Bitter Lesson: "Welcome to the Era of Experience"
Sutton and his advisee Silver argue that the “era of human data,” dominated by supervised pre‑training and RL‑from‑human‑feedback, has hit diminishing returns; the future will belong to agents that
— act continuously in real or simulated worlds,
— generate and label their own training data through interaction
— optimise rewards grounded in the environment rather than in human preference alone, and
— refine their world‑models and plans over lifelong streams of experience.