Rich Sutton: "I'm not weird. The field is weird"
Rich Sutton argues continual learning is just learning — the field's framing is the anomaly
“I'm not weird. The field is weird.”
RL pioneer Rich Sutton pushes back on the framing of 'continual learning' as a special subfield, arguing all learning is inherently continual and the term only became necessary due to the field's fixation on static training paradigms. His provocation challenges the dominant pretraining-then-deployment paradigm that underpins most current LLM development. While not a product announcement, it signals a foundational critique from one of the field's most respected voices.