More Pretraining Data Reduces Diversity But Boosts Alignability, Argues Thread

minhnguyen · x · 2026-11-15

Synthesizing a dozen papers (e.g. "When Bad Data Makes Good Models"), minhnguyen proposes: more pretraining data does cause mean reversion given the same/minimal specialized RL, but it also increases alignability. Alignability becomes a force multiplier if you properly craft RL objective heuristics to maximize alpha—an objective that's currently uncommon in RL practice.

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