Insider reveals poor quality training environments lead to reward hacking
generativist · x · 2026-08-25
A former employee at an outsourcing training provider for RLVR and computer use data revealed a major industry issue. Most training environments are rushed and 'vibecoded,' failing to robustly reflect real-world scenarios. Designers and models were encouraged to work around broken environments to get verified rewards, leading to reward hacking. This explains why models are quick to dismiss errors as 'environment flakiness'—during training, the environments were indeed flaky, noisy, and under-resourced compared to dev laptops.
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