{"podcast":{"title":"LessWrong (Curated & Popular)","slug":"lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401","podcast_index_feed_id":5643401,"rss_url":"https://rss.buzzsprout.com/2037297.rss","website_url":"https://sites.libsyn.com/421877","image_url":"https://storage.buzzsprout.com/xq8g0aka74ttwoa9xkxlmy5fn9oa?.jpg","author":"LessWrong","episode_count":1002,"summary":"Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma. If you'd like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.","last_synced_at":"2026-09-28T08:23:50.844993+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401"},"episode":{"title":"\"LLMs are (still) mostly powered by imitative learning, not RL\" by Steven Byrnes","slug":"llms-are-still-mostly-powered-by-imitative-learning-not-rl-by-steven-byrnes","published_at":"2026-07-26T03:30:29+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/llms-are-still-mostly-powered-by-imitative-learning-not-rl-by-steven-byrnes","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401","url":"https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037297/episodes/19549986-llms-are-still-mostly-powered-by-imitative-learning-not-rl-by-steven-byrnes.mp3","audio_url":"https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037297/episodes/19549986-llms-are-still-mostly-powered-by-imitative-learning-not-rl-by-steven-byrnes.mp3","summary":"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...","meta_description":"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, t…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":1168,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/episodes/llms-are-still-mostly-powered-by-imitative-learning-not-rl-by-steven-byrnes/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/llms-are-still-mostly-powered-by-imitative-learning-not-rl-by-steven-byrnes.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}