A PhD student reflects on how artificial intelligence has transformed research from 2015 to September 2026, evolving from image classification tools to large language models that assist with mathematical proofs and optimization problems, fundamentally changing their daily research workflow.
Rich Sutton argues that 70 years of AI research demonstrates that general methods leveraging massive computation ultimately outperform approaches that rely on human domain knowledge. He illustrates this through examples in chess, Go, and speech recognition, where computation-intensive techniques defeated human-knowledge-based methods despite initial skepticism from researchers.