Yoav Goldberg: The Jevons Debate Is Really About LLMs Replacing Data Scientists

yoavgo · x · 2026-09-23

AI researcher Yoav Goldberg weighs in on the Jevons paradox discourse, arguing the real story isn't the economics of a product category but the reaction of people who took over jobs previously done by data scientists, now accomplished with LLMs.

He agrees that making tasks easy (0-shot, ICL), fast, and cheap is genuine value add. The thread also speculates on the RLCD training method: Goldberg guesses it's largely a combination of Verified Rewards and Execution Feedback (or cross-entropy for probabilistic outputs), and asks whether there's any secret sauce beyond that.

Related event: Researchers Debate Jevons Paradox and the Essence of RLCD(4 posts)→

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