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Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025) - by Dwarkesh Patel

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I’m confused why some people have short timelines and at the same time are bullish on RLVR. If we’re actually close to a human-like learner, this whole approach is doomed. 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 building RL environments which teach the model how to use Excel to write financial models or navigate a web browser. Either these models will soon learn on the job in a self directed way - making all this pre-baking pointless - or they won’t - which means AGI is not imminent. Humans don’t have to go through a special training phase where they need to rehearse every single piece of software they might ever use. Beren made interesting points about this in a recent blog post: When we see frontier models improving at various benchmarks we should think not just of increased scale and clever ML research ideas but billions of dollars spent paying PhDs, MDs, and other experts to wr

Blog Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025) Why I'm moderately bearish in the short term, and explosively bullish in the long term Dwarkesh Patel Dec 02, 2025 530 50 67 Share What are we scaling? I’m confused why some people have short timelines and at the same time are bullish on the current scale up of reinforcement learning atop LLMs. If we’re actually close to a human-like learner, this whole approach of training on verifiable outcomes is doomed. 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 bui

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