# "LLMs are (still) mostly powered by imitative learning, not RL" by Steven Byrnes

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/llms-are-still-mostly-powered-by-imitative-learning-not-rl-by-steven-byrnes
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/llms-are-still-mostly-powered-by-imitative-learning-not-rl-by-steven-byrnes.md
Podcast: [LessWrong (Curated & Popular)](https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401)
Published: 2026-07-26T03:30:29+00:00
Episode link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037297/episodes/19549986-llms-are-still-mostly-powered-by-imitative-learning-not-rl-by-steven-byrnes.mp3
Audio file: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037297/episodes/19549986-llms-are-still-mostly-powered-by-imitative-learning-not-rl-by-steven-byrnes.mp3
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Duration seconds: 1168

## Resource

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) is the hot new thing in LLM training. It's so hot, and people spend so much time talking about it, that they sometimes lose sight of the big picture. Stepping back, LLMs can do lots of very impressive things. How? Where did those capabilities come from? Fundamentally, they come from a combination of: (1) Imitative learning, including pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) See my earlier discussion: “LLM pretraining magically tra...

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