“Teaching AI to reason: this year’s most important story” by Benjamin_Todd

This is a link post.

I wrote this to try to explain the key thing going on with AI right now to a broader audience. Feedback welcome.

Most people think of AI as a pattern-matching chatbot – good at writing emails, terrible at real thinking.

They've missed something huge.

In 2024, while many declared AI was reaching a plateau, it was actually entering a new paradigm: learning to reason using reinforcement learning.

This approach isn’t limited by data, so could deliver beyond-human capabilities in coding and scientific reasoning within two years.

Here's a simple introduction to how it works, and why it's the most important development that most people have missed.

The new paradigm: reinforcement learning

People sometimes say “chatGPT is just next token prediction on the internet”. But that's never been quite true.

Raw next token prediction produces outputs that are regularly crazy.

GPT only became useful with the [...]

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Outline:

(00:51) The new paradigm: reinforcement learning

(02:32) Reasoning models breakthroughs

(04:09) A new rate of progress?

(07:53) Why this is just the beginning

(11:02) Two more accelerants

(16:12) The key thing to watch: AI doing AI research

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First published:
February 13th, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZuWcG3W3rEBxLceWj/teaching-ai-to-reason-this-year-s-most-important-story

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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