Organizations are messy “garbage cans,” and our instinct is to tame that mess with handcrafted process and bespoke agents like Manus. The Bitter Lesson says the opposite often wins—systems trained for outcomes, scaled with compute, tend to outpace careful craft.

References from this article

• Moving off the Map: How Knowledge of Organizational Operations Empowers and Alienates by Ruthanne Huising
• The Garbage Can Model
• 43% of American workers have used AI at work (research paper)
• The Bitter Lesson by Richard Sutton (2019 essay)
• Our first AI-powered teaching games
• AI ability to work autonomously is increasing very rapidly
• Manus
• Tips for building agents from the Manus team
• ChatGPT agent
• OpenAI used reinforcement learning to train their AI
• Atlantic article on chess ratings
• Original article link