An audio version of my blog post, Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)

I'm confused why some people have super short timelines, yet at the same time are bullish on scaling up reinforcement learning atop LLMs. If we're actually close to a human like learner, then this whole approach of training on verifiable outcomes is doomed. Now, currently the labs are trying to bake in a bunch of skills into these models through mid training. There's an entire supply chain of companies that are building RL environments, which teach the model how to navigate a web browser or use Excel to build financial models. Now, either these models will soon learn on the job in a self direc