Rich Sutton helped pioneer the technology behind today’s AI boom. Now he thinks Big Tech’s push to keep AI going is all wrong.
On an episode of Sequoia’s podcast released Tuesday, the Canadian computer scientist and Turing Award winner said that the AI industry is headed in the wrong direction because of its reliance on synthetic training data.
“That’s just a big mistake,” he said when asked about using synthetic data as a way to keep scaling large language models. “Maybe it’s the next big lesson.”
Synthetic data is information artificially produced by algorithms or AI models rather than collected from original, real-world sources. It has…
