Pineau: Out-of-the-box reinforcement learning will not deliver AGI
Joelle Pineau · Cohere's Chief AI Officer, Joelle Pineau: Why Scaling Laws Will Continue & Future of Synthetic Data · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Nov 3, 2025 · at 3:24
Joelle Pineau, Chief AI Officer at Cohere, addresses claims about artificial general intelligence, explaining why reinforcement learning alone cannot achieve AGI due to severe learning inefficiency.
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“Now, you know, where we're maybe getting a little bit ahead is thinking that just RL out of the box is gonna give us AGI. That part, a lot less so. You know, if you look at the curve of progress, RL is terribly inefficient, and so the amount of signal you need to get in order to really shape the behavior of a model is far from where we are today, and so we'll need to figure out how to really deal with this learning efficiency problem.”
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