KI-Pioneer Sutton calls synthetic data a "big mistake" in the face of an infinitely complex world

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Aug 20, 2026

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AI researcher Richard Sutton pushes back against a core strategy at the leading AI labs. Synthetic data won't solve the scaling problem for large language models, he says, and blames the sheer complexity of the world.

Turing Award winner Richard Sutton is considered one of the founders of reinforcement learning. He wrote the field's standard textbook, mentored researchers like David Silver, who later worked on AlphaGo, and penned the influential 2019 essay "The Bitter Lesson." In it, Sutton argues that over the long run, only the AI methods that scale with compute win out, things like search and learning, not the ones that rely on built-in human knowledge.