[jetrink]

The Bitter Lesson is specifically about AI. The lesson restated is that over the long run, methods that leverage general computation (brute-force search and learning) consistently outperform systems built with extensive human-crafted knowledge. Examples: Chess, Go, speech recognition, computer vision, machine translation, and on and on.

[AndrewKemendo]

This is correct however I’d add that it’s not just “AI” colloquially - it’s a statement about any two optimization systems that are trying to scale.

So any system that predicts the optimization with a general solver can scale better than heuristic or constrained space solvers

Up till recently there’s been no general solvers at that scale

[fiddlerwoaroof]

I think it oversimplifies, though and I think it’s shortsighted to underfund the (harder) crafted systems on the basis of this observation because, when you’re limited by scaling, the other research will save you.