Synergistic Amplification Between Pretraining and RL
zeeshanp_ · x · 2026-07-18
The author believes there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between pretraining and reinforcement learning (RL).
They point out that while simply scaling up pretraining might hit diminishing marginal returns, scaling up RL could unlock latent capabilities within the model. The emergence of these capabilities, in turn, relies on the continued expansion of model capacity and data. The overall conclusion: over the past two years, frontier labs have clearly observed this "pretraining + RL" synergy by scaling compute and iterating pretraining recipes, and many new scaling laws remain to be discovered.
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