The Bitter Lesson - RL Environments Version

Read my thoughts on The Bitter Lesson - RL Environments Version

Let’s address the biggest qualms with data and RL env companies today: While realistic RL environments are needed to push performance today, the high cost of building & maintaining environments: realistic, high-fidelity simulations or replicas are expensive to develop and keep up to date. Successful RL environment startups will move building systems that reduce cost, increase reusability, and, through building 100s of RL environments, figure out automation in RL environment creation or some new insight about building verifiers more easily for strictly non-verifiable outputs. Look for startups

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• Freeman Irabaruta

related reading

• State of Data (Jan 2026)seancai.com
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• RL Environments and RL for Science: Data Foundries and Multi-Agent Architecturesnewsletter.semianalysis.com
• Trust me bro, just one more RL scale up, this one will be the real scale up with the good environments, the actually legit one, trust me bro — AI Alignment Forumalignmentforum.org
• Akash Bajwa on X: "RL Environments with Scale AI" / Xx.com
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