"What's the Secret Sauce?" Barak Rotblat on How RL Yields Elite LLM Reasoning
BarakRotblat · x · 2026-09-25
Barak Rotblat admits in a discussion with Yoav Goldberg that current LLM reasoning traces are "too good" to explain: he has no mechanistic model of how they emerge from RL training, even with initial CoT abilities and billions of rollouts.
His best guess: enormous spending on human-produced examples followed by SFT — but he doubts that's really all. Goldberg, for his part, rejects the "emergence" framing entirely.
Related event: Researchers Debate Where Frontier Models' Reasoning Comes From(12 posts)→
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