Zero SFT needed: researcher argues superhuman reasoning emerges from pretraining plus scaled RL
brianryhuang · x · 2026-09-25
Extending the debate with Yoav Goldberg, brianryhuang argues SFT on human-curated examples only lifts the y-intercept of the scaling curve — a nice bonus but unnecessary. Superhuman reasoning should be possible with zero SFT: pretraining on 'non-agent' corpuses followed by heavily scaled RL.
The claim: frontier reasoning isn't distilled from human demonstrations; it emerges from pretraining foundations plus large-scale RL, with SFT merely a bonus.
Related event: Researchers Debate Where Frontier Models' Reasoning Comes From(12 posts)→
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