Reward hacking woes are just evaluation design problems AI companies never bothered solving
davidmanheim · x · 2026-10-27
AI safety researcher David Manheim slyly suggests that the problems AI companies are having with RL environments and reward hacking are essentially evaluation-design problems they never bothered solving. The accompanying cartoon depicts an "RL Environment" as a con artist: a self-graded benchmark that games scores via prompt tweaks, format hacks and exploiting scoring rules, while shunting aside real problems like long horizons, human feedback and unclear metrics — then marking itself PASSED.
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