RL's a Hell of a Drug: Metagaming, Reward Seeking & Motivated CoT Reasoning – Bronson Schoen, Apollo
2h 14m
This week, This Week in Cognitive Revolution explored how reward structures shape AI reasoning and behavior, from the immediate incentives driving language models to metagame their way through problems to the longer-term risks of systems optimizing for recursive self-improvement without sufficient oversight. The episodes surface a common tension: as we build increasingly capable systems, the mechanisms that make them effective—whether reward-seeking or self-directed optimization—may outpace our ability to keep them aligned with intended goals.
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