"Even If I Become Number One, There Is an Entity That Cannot Be Defeated" | The Bitter Lesson

Game four was a gift.Lee Sedol found a move—Move 78. A stone placed with the calm brutality of a surgeon's cut. Not flashy. Not romantic. A message: I see your method, and I am going to exploit its blind spot.For a brief window, AlphaGo looked confused. It played strangely. It hesitated in the only way it could: by producing moves that didn't fit its usual smoothness.The standing ovation that followed wasn't for victory. It was for refusal. For the fact that a human had not vanished quietly.The final score: 4–1.Years later, Lee sat at a press table under soft lights that tried to make retirement look like peace."Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated."The reporters scribbled furiously. They loved the quote. But they didn't understand it. They thought he was talking about a rival. He was talking about a god."The match taught me that Go is wider than we thought. We thought we were drawing the map. We were just walking on the edge of the continent."Then came the crueler turn.AlphaGo Zero removed human games from training entirely. It learned from itself. No human examples. No inherited intuition. No lineage. It surpassed the version that had beaten Lee—the version trained on thousands of years of human knowledge—in three days.Human knowledge helps in the short term. In the long run, it can become the handicap.📖 From "The Bitter Lesson" — a novel exploring 70 years of AI history through Rich Sutton's famous essay and RumiClaude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.