Comment by crawshaw

The bitter lesson is a wonderful essay and well worth a read: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

I also believe the original bitter lesson essay is correct. General methods on more powerful compute will supersede anything specific built today.

However I believe the lesson in this blog post is an incorrect conclusion. It is roughly analogous to "all people die, so do not bother having children because they will die one day." It is true that what you build today will be replaced in the future. That is OK. Don't get caught out when it happens. But building specific systems today is the only way to make progress with products.

Waymo started some 12 years ago as Google Chauffeur, built on all sorts of image/object recognition systems that I am sure have fallen to the bitter lesson. Should Google have refused to start a self-driving car project 12 years ago, because generalized transformers would replace a lot of their work in the future? No. You have to build products with what you've got, where you are. Adopt better tools when they come along.