Researcher: purely on-policy RL is too sample-inefficient for long-horizon agents

JoshPurtell · x · 2026-10-29

A researcher running scaled RL experiments on Thinking Machines' Tinker and Prime Intellect argues that purely on-policy RL is extremely sample-inefficient and expensive, making it unlikely to work for long-horizon agentic scenarios. He calls for rethinking how agents learn from experience beyond scaling on-policy rollouts, and teases a promising direction to be shared soon.

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