You can’t imitation-learn how to continual-learn — LessWrong
In this post, I’m trying to put forward a narrow, pedagogical point, one that comes up mainly when I’m arguing in favor of LLMs having limitations that human learning does not. …
x You can’t imitation-learn how to continual-learn — LessWrong AI Curated 2026 Top Fifty: 9 % 206 You can’t imitation-learn how to continual-learn by Steven Byrnes 16th Mar 2026 7 min read 54 206 In this post, I’m trying to put forward a narrow, pedagogical point, one that comes up mainly when I’m arguing in favor of LLMs having limitations that human learning does not. (E.g. here , here , here .) See the bottom of the post for a list of subtexts that you should NOT read into this post, including “…therefore LLMs are dumb”, or “…therefore LLMs can’t possibly scale to superintelligence”. Some i
related reading
- Why We Need Continual Learning | Andreessen Horowitza16z.com
- Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade awaydwarkesh.com
- How can LLM RL Work Despite Information-Theoretic Inefficiencyberen.io
- The Continual Learning Problemjessylin.com
- NL.pdfabehrouz.github.io
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- GenAI Handbookgenai-handbook.github.io
- [2605.12484] Learning, Fast and Slow: Towards LLMs That Adapt Continuallyarxiv.org
- Animals vs Ghosts – karpathykarpathy.bearblog.dev
- What are the real problems of continual learning?infinitefaculty.substack.com
- What's so hard about continuous learning?seangoedecke.com
- Learning without training: The implicit dynamics of in-context learningarxiv.org