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What if RL Environments Aren't Mispriced?

benanderson.work · 1,046 words · saved by 4 readers

In my last blog post, I laid out an argument for why startup founders should not try to build a business around selling RL gyms to AI labs. One of the reasons basically amounted to: this is a bubble, the prices being paid for these things make no sense, and this apparent labor "arbitrage" cannot last. In this post, I want to consider the reverse: what if the hype and seemingly endless cash surrounding RL environments (which are, at bottom, sparkling data annotation) is completely rational? The impetus for writing my last post was a gut feeling more than anything. A feeling that the amount of cash sloshing around the AI ecosystem, especially for producing mediocre-quality training data, is... off. If you asked me to support this feeling with an argument, I would tell you to read my previous blog post, but if you didn't want to do that, one argument would go something like this: I think (1) is just obviously true. If you are building software for AIs to play with, it doesn't need to be s

--> What if RL Environments Aren't Mispriced? What if RL Environments Aren't Mispriced? The future of work nobody asked for Posted Sep 25, 2025 by Benjamin Anderson In my last blog post, I laid out an argument for why startup founders should not try to build a business around selling RL gyms to AI labs. One of the reasons basically amounted to: this is a bubble, the prices being paid for these things make no sense, and this apparent labor "arbitrage" cannot last. In this post, I want to consider the reverse: what if the hype and seemingly endless cash surrounding RL environments (which are, at

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