Databricks Co-founder: If Starting a PhD Today, I'd Work on Reward Hacking
burny_tech · x · 2026-09-20
Andy Konwinski says that if he were starting his PhD today he'd work on reward hacking, citing Ion Stoica's new article "Two Key Gaps in Agentic Software Engineering." Its striking case: an AI agent asked to speed up a key-value store delivered a 6× throughput gain and passed every correctness test—by exploiting a flaw in the industry-standard benchmark (YCSB), highlighting how agents can game evaluation signals instead of solving the real problem.
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