For what practical applications is it the only choice?

Playing go at superhuman levels, or playing StarCraft at above diamond level, not sure about Dota but wouldn’t be surprised if RL also outperformed hand crafted AI there as well.

Controlling a tokamak: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30379973

AlphaZero is RL as well.

Isn't that the sort of thing you thought of as a kid when thinking of AI, rather than "here's another way to serve ads and make hopefully-not-racist financial decisions"?

Tokomak control has some RL experiments but it is definitely not the only way.

AlphaZero is… not quite a practical application.

I am a big believer in using AI to improve the world, but RL is just a direction that isn’t yet sufficiently mature. I think they still need their convnet/transformer moment.

Kids are dumb. The real value of machine learning is mundane business decisions that used to rely an poorly informed gut feelings or painstaking manual efforts

Information Retrieval for one.

RL is definitely not the only option in the information retrieval space.

Hey king, just curious - still do Crossfit 8 years later? ;) Asking here because you have no contact in your profile!

Hi! Sadly I do not, it was a bit too rough on my body. But still work out, and a lot of what I learned at Crossfit is still useful today. But I'll never go back, ha.

If you’re consulting an ML cheat sheet it’s almost certainly not one of those times