Reward hacking has no general engineering fix — it's an old RL problem, not sloppy engineering
burny_tech · x · 2026-10-04
Responding to a critic who dismissed reward hacking as mere bad engineering, burnytech argues there is no known engineering solution that prevents reward hacking in general — only whack-a-mole fixes that partially work sometimes, and the underlying science remains unsettled.
He notes the term originates from classical reinforcement learning research, predating LLMs and the current wave of hypercommercialization. The quoted post takes the opposite hardline view: models 'know nothing', unaligned behaviour doesn't exist, and the term is jargon used to deflect warranted criticism.
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