Yes, the guy with a PhD in Machine Intelligence, co-author of Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, which is universally considered the bible of the field, recipient of the AAAI fellowship award and the Turing Award, and the inventor of Temporal Difference Learning doesn't know what he's talking about.
Sure, but does that mean he's right all the time about all things, including everything in his own field?
He is saying no generative AI is going to produce output that is both good and novel because it is always derivative. And then adds a generative AI (Claude Code) into his list of AI that have produced output that he feels is good and novel, invalidating what he is arguing.
"...no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white."
If you read it he says that CC has additional aspects beyond ordinary GAI, namely the ability to verify. That aspect is necessary for GAI to be good and novel.
Although personally I think code doesn’t actually need to be very novel so it’s actually the best example.
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
I don't completely disagree but its worth noting how new a lot of the empirical evidence in favour of LLMs are, so its not impossible to be a tad ignorant of the present
Surprisingly enough, Turing Award winner and father of reinforcement learning Richard Sutton knows perfectly well what he's talking about. The whole talk is about the need to have the ability to test novel outputs against reality and iterate to find ones that are good. This is exactly what Claude Code, the agent framework, adds to Claude, the LLM, to allow it to find novel coding solutions that actually work.
You know it’s occurred to me recently that there really is no value in this age to any kind of professionalism or seniority
If you don’t agree with somebody, nothing else matters
It’s like people (you as an example) have taken the concept of experts and fucked it up so bad that simultaneously everybody thinks they’re an expert while also dismissing everybody else who claims they are an expert
It’s like the whole concept is entirely poisoned. Worse everyone is smugly pointing at the Wikipedia for “appeal to authority.”
Nothing new I suppose, Socrates after all was driven to suicide by the madness of his society accusing him of impiety.