> ...It is in a format that resembles a published article because it is going to be a published article? "This is a preprint of a chapter that will appear in the book Designing an Intelligence, published by MIT Press." on the first page.
It doesn't make any difference and doesn't invalidate my critique. It appears to be a science communication book, so it could easily be a web page. Even if it was a LaTeXish PDF there were multiple ways to not making it a PDF that resembles a scientific article, there's a precise choice being made about how to communicate.
The medium is the message.
> A history of RL from DQN to AlphaProof/LLM computer use in Gemini is not 'generic', and could not be.
History of RL is not 'generic' and is indeed really interesting, I look forward to reading Sutton's book! But the graph in the PDF is. The y-axis is ill-defined because
1. it combines different technologies (DQN, AlphaGo, GPT models) on a single continuum implying direct comparison.
2. the evergreen hypester future trajectory toward "superhuman intelligence"
I will not comment further on the graph, it's not a interesting visualization in my opinion and only serves the author's purpose for the narrative of "feeling the AGI (through RL)”
There would be more interesting way of plotting this information for a general public.
I agree that is harsh from me that it doesn’t provide value. Maybe it provides value to people who want to explore RL now, but again, the medium is the message, and this format is clearly saying out loud “look at me, I’m a paper, trust me.”