The Second Half

tldr: We’re at AI’s halftime. For decades, AI has largely been about developing new training methods and models. And it worked: from beating world champions at chess and Go, surpassing most humans on the SAT and bar exams, to earning IMO and IOI gold medals. Behind these milestones in the history book — DeepBlue, AlphaGo, GPT-4, and the o-series — are fundamental innovations in AI methods: search, deep RL, scaling, and reasoning. Things just get better over time. So what’s suddenly different now? In three words: RL finally works. More precisely: RL finally generalizes. After several major detours and a culmination of milestones, we’ve landed on a working recipe to solve a wide range of RL tasks using language and reasoning. Even a year ago, if you told most AI researchers that a single recipe could tackle software engineering, creative writing, IMO-level math, mouse-and-keyboard manipulation, and long-form question answering — they’d laugh at your hallucinations. Each of these tasks ... Read full article.