'RL Is the Whole Cake': New Framing Sparks Debate Over Pretraining's Role

AI commentators argue pretraining is merely initialization for reinforcement learning, which is the real driver of intelligence—overturning Yann LeCun's old analogy of RL as just 'the cherry on the cake,' and sparking debate over how next-token prediction should be understood.

2026-09-19 ~ 2026-09-19 · 3 related posts

• RL isn't a cherry on the cake: pretraining is just initialization for RL — maksym_andr · 2026-09-19
• "RL is the whole cake, not the cherry": follow-up on pretraining vs reinforcement learning — maksym_andr · 2026-09-19
• Next-token prediction is just an initialization stage for RL, argue AI researchers — maksym_andr · 2026-09-19