Reinforcement learning

Jul 31, 2026

Learning on the Job: The Future of Post-Training — Raymond Feng, Applied Compute

Raymond Feng presents Applied Compute's approach to training custom AI models that learn "on the job" using reinforcement learning. He details the evolution from controlled Q&A to synthetic environments, highlighting the core GRPO-style loop. A major focus is tackling the challenges of environment fidelity and "reward hacking" in simulated settings. The discussion then moves to the complexities of training directly within real-world enterprise harnesses, addressing issues like non-replayability and off-policy data. Feng concludes by outlining frontier research in self-distillation, automated data pipelines, and qualitative feedback, envisioning a future where models continuously learn and self-evaluate from every interaction, making "experience the dominant medium of improvement."

Jul 31, 2026

Data and Environment Curation for Post-Training LLMs — Mahesh Sathiamoorthy, Bespoke Labs

Mahesh Sathiamoorthy of Bespoke Labs argues that high-quality data and curated RL environments are the true bottlenecks for post-training LLMs, especially for building reliable, autonomous agents. He grounds this in experiences with OpenThoughts, a reasoning dataset, highlighting counterintuitive lessons like the importance of diverse reasoning traces and the fact that stronger teachers aren't always best. A key takeaway, reinforced by their Curator tooling, is that a disciplined curation stack is essential for transforming base models into capable, post-trained agents for real-world applications like credit card compliance.

Jul 31, 2026

Reinforcement Learning without Verifiable Rewards — Will Brown, Prime Intellect

Will Brown's talk addresses the critical challenge of applying Reinforcement Learning to real-world tasks where verifiable rewards are absent. He outlines how Primordial AI tackles this by leveraging environments as the core anchor for building reward signals. Key strategies include using LLMs as "judges," grounding tasks in production traces or document corpora, and employing "reverse direction" techniques to generate training data. Brown also details methods for calibrating task difficulty, identifying reward hacking, and fostering continual learning by treating model optimization as a science, emphasizing the use of compute to refine environmental signals and abstract human expertise.

Jul 31, 2026

Agents at Scale: Inside MiniMax's Model and the Infrastructure Behind It — Olive Song

Olive Song, RL lead at MiniMax, details the engineering behind MiniMax's open-weight models, focusing on M3's multimodal and agentic capabilities, the necessity of day-zero inference stack readiness, and continuous GPU kernel optimization. She discusses multimodal training challenges, long-horizon task evaluation, and expresses optimism for open models rapidly closing the gap with frontier labs.

Jul 29, 2026

Multi-GPU Kernels, Intelligence per Watt, Heterogeneous Inference, and More | YC Paper Club

This YC Paper Club explored the growing trend of specialization in AI hardware and software, covering multi-GPU kernel optimization, intelligence per watt metrics for local AI inference, the implications of AI writing systems code, heterogeneous hardware designs for inference, and GPU-accelerated game engines for reinforcement learning.

Jul 29, 2026

Building the Automated AGI Lab: Core Automation's Jerry Tworek and Rohan Anil

Jerry Tworek and Rohan Anil, founders of Core Automation, argue that the transformer architecture has reached its limits and the primary bottleneck to smarter AI systems is now architectural. They contend that current models lack continual learning and test-time adaptation capabilities, critical for real-world deployment. They advocate for new architectures that learn from experience more efficiently than current reinforcement learning, optimize pre-training and RL end-to-end, and build a highly automated lab focused on accelerating innovation through kernel generation, aiming for models that can improve themselves without human intervention.