Episode
"RL creates split personas" by Jan Betley
- Published
- Aug 20, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 547
- Processing state
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- https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037297/episodes/19675692-rl-creates-split-personas-by-jan-betley.mp3
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Summary
I describe my current view of personas in LLMs and why RL leads to egregious reward hacking in some contexts while the same models seem very aligned in other contexts. This post describes the framing/paradigm without any new experimental results. I'm quite confident this framing makes sense, but it's far from being proven. Main claim The Persona Selection Model says that post-training strengthens and refines the Assistant persona. This is true, but later (or in parallel) RL leads ...