Brooks says his review, including this comment, is seventy-six words shorter than Sutton's post.

Compare the word count of Brooks's 19 March 2019 review ('A Better Lesson', including the comment about word count) with Richard Sutton's 'The Bitter Lesson' (March 2019), counting body text by a consistent method. True: Brooks's piece is shorter by exactly 76 words, or by a figure that comes to 76 under a reasonable counting method. Mostly true: Brooks's piece is shorter by 70–82 words, a gap explained by differences in counting (titles, hyphenation, numbers). Mostly false: Brooks's piece is shorter, but by a clearly different amount (more than 6 words from 76). False: Brooks's piece is the same length as or longer than Sutton's.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Competing Theses robot-wiki.com · 12 August 2026

   “Brooks answered six days later, in a reply that paraphrases Sutton and describes itself, including its closing comment, as "seventy six words shorter than Sutton's post"”

2. E2 Rich Sutton publishes "The Bitter Lesson" postcutoff.com

   “In about 1,100 words Sutton argued that researchers keep trying to build human knowledge into AI systems”

3. E3 The Bitter Lesson incompleteideas.net (Rich Sutton) · 13 March 2019

   “The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin.”

4. E4 Competing Theses Robot Wiki · 12 August 2026

   “Brooks answered six days later, in a reply that paraphrases Sutton and describes itself, including its closing comment, as "seventy six words shorter than Sutton's post"”

5. E5 March 2019 – Rodney Brooks Rodney Brooks (rodneybrooks.com) · 19 March 2019 Own record

   “I’m going to try to keep this review shorter than his post.”

E1 and E4 only repeat Brooks's own statement that his review is seventy-six words shorter than Sutton's post. Neither gives a word count for either text. E2 puts Sutton's essay at "about 1,100 words", a rough figure with no counting method and no count for Brooks's review. E3 and E5 quote only single sentences from the two texts, so the evidence cannot show whether the gap is 76 words.