# Bitter Lesson Projects at AI Tinkerers

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> Markdown URL: https://aitinkerers.org/technologies/bitter-lesson.md
> Technology record last updated: 2026-05-05T09:13:22Z
> Generated: 2026-08-26T09:18:02Z

General-purpose methods (search and learning) that scale with computation consistently outperform human-engineered, domain-specific knowledge in AI.

The Bitter Lesson, articulated by Richard Sutton in 2019, observes a 70-year trend in AI: leveraging massive computation with simple, general methods ultimately yields greater progress than embedding complex human knowledge or hand-crafted features. This is the 'bitter' truth: our clever, domain-specific ideas plateau, while scalable approaches win over the long run. Key examples include Deep Blue's deep search beating human-knowledge-based chess programs in 1997, and AlphaGo Zero's self-play (pure learning/search) surpassing the original AlphaGo (which used human expert data). The lesson directs research toward general algorithms—like deep learning and search—that can fully exploit Moore's Law and its exponential computational growth.

- Official technology site: https://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
- Public AI Tinkerers demos and talks: 1
- Result page: 1 of 1

## Recent Public Talks and Demos

### [SOTA on swebench-verified with bitter lesson](https://london.aitinkerers.org/talks/rsvp_Pck-GuvN7rU)

At CodeStory, we are always looking for new ways to beat frontier metrics and achieve SOTA. When starting to work on swe-bench-verified, we realised that instead of doing the smart things, like MCTS or code execution driven RL, doing the dumb thing and scaling it works the best. This is how we are CodeStory were able to achieve 62.4% SOTA score on swebench-verified.

- Event context: AI Tinkerers London - January Meetup — 2025-01-22 — London
- Public talk page: https://london.aitinkerers.org/talks/rsvp_Pck-GuvN7rU

## Related Technologies

- [CodeStory](https://aitinkerers.org/technologies/codestory) ([Markdown](https://aitinkerers.org/technologies/codestory.md)) — 1 public demo
- [SweBench-Verified](https://aitinkerers.org/technologies/swebench-verified) ([Markdown](https://aitinkerers.org/technologies/swebench-verified.md)) — 1 public demo