Lots of people think it's obvious that humans learn by imitation, starting with babies imitating their parents. Richard Sutton thinks this is completely wrong. Sutton basically thinks direct imitation plays almost no role in animal learning, and at most a small role in human intelligence. When one animal ends up doing the same thing as another, he thinks this is the result of RL-style trial-and-error, not direct imitation. And if imitation isn't really a kind of learning, then training LLMs…