The ‘era of experience’ will unleash self-learning AI agents across the web—here’s how to prepare

David Silver and Richard Sutton, two renowned AI scientists, argue in a new paper that artificial intelligence is about to enter a new phase, the “Era of Experience.” This is where AI systems rely increasingly less on human-provided data and improve themselves by gathering data from and interacting with the world.

While the paper is conceptual and forward-looking, it has direct implications for enterprises that aim to build with and for future AI agents and systems. 

Both Silver and Sutton are seasoned scientists with a track record of making accurate predictions about the future of AI. The validity predictions can be directly seen in today’s most advanced AI systems. In 2019, Sutton, a pioneer in reinforcement learning, wrote the famous essay “The Bitter Lesson,” in which he argues that the greatest long-term progress in AI consistently arises from leveraging large-scale computation with general-purpose search and learning methods, rather than ...