Tim O'Reilly
Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media, Partner, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Co-director, The AI Disclosures Project
“The AI industry as a whole is bitter lesson pilled. And I am human-pilled. … I find it rather disturbing that the AI community is not spending more time saying, how do we make this future friendlier for humans? … The chief economists of AI companies study job losses from AI, but they don't study, well, what mechanisms could we introduce to make new economic opportunities for humans?”
MLOps.community · AI Builders · October 2026
Context
O'Reilly previewing a conference talk built around Richard Sutton's "The Bitter Lesson," the essay arguing that raw computation beats human expertise. He says the labs think about keeping AI from going rogue but not about simple affordances for a human economy.
Transcript
…the knowledge they could retain in their heads. And we've been building more and better affordances for sharing that knowledge through time, through space. And AI is a continuation of that. But in each of these transitions, we have to think about, well, what's the value of the truly human still?
…more of, can I create an ecosystem so that everyone can thrive off of this and we can build on top of it? That's right. Flourish. Tim, it's great to have you here. You're going to be giving a talk at AgentCon and MCPCon in San Jose on October 22nd and 23rd. What are you going to be talking about?
Really, I'm talking a lot about this idea of how do we grapple as humans with the bitter lesson. For those who aren't familiar with it, The Bitter Lesson was a 2019 paper by Richard Sutton about how raw computation outperforms human expertise. And I have to say, you know, the AI industry as a whole is bitter lesson pilled. And I am human-pilled. You know, I have to, I'm saying, look, we as humans have to figure out our role in the AI economy. And I find it rather disturbing that the AI community is not spending more time saying, how do we make this future friendlier for humans? I mean, they think about, well, how do we, you know, keep AI from going rogue, but they don't think about simple affordances for the human economy of the future. The chief economists of AI companies study job losses from AI, but they don't study, well, what mechanisms could we introduce to make new economic opportunities for humans?
And are there some things that you feel like would be in that direction? Like, give me some examples of how we could study.
Obviously, this very much concerns us at O'Reilly because we are a company that is rooted in the idea of capturing and sharing human expertise. You know, we don't think of ourselves as a publisher or a conference producer or an online learning platform so much as we think of a company that does…
Nice.