GRPO
6 statements across 6 episodes · 2 bullish · 2 bearish · 6 people on the record · first statement Apr 29, 2025 by Roger Jin · across every show →
Everything said about GRPO, oldest first
Apr 29, 2025
Jin: Policy gradient algorithms function as weighted supervised fine-tuning
“If you kind of, like, look at, if you kind of stare at, like, this part it sort of looks like just, like, weighted supervised fine-tuning, right? Like, you have this, like, log of, like, the probability of a token and, like, some, like, weight on it and reinfo…”
May 23, 2025 positive
Brown: GRPO is more memory efficient and easier to distribute
“GRPO is, like, great for, like, leaning heavy on highly parallel inference compute. It's more memory efficient for the actual training process. It's much easier to do in a distributed fashion because you have less gradient syncing and less model weight copies.”
Oct 11, 2025 negative
Oct 16, 2025 bearish
Corbitt: GRPO is likely a dead end due to parallel rollout constraints
“The big downside, the huge downside of GRPO, and I think actually the reason why GRPO actually is likely to be a dead end, and we probably will not be continue using it indefinitely. The fact that you need to have these parallel rollouts in order to train on i…”
Dec 31, 2025 positive
McGrath: DeepSeek Math's real breakthrough is verifiable reward trust, not GRPO
“As you said, it came out in the deep seek math paper, and like, it's an interesting optimization method, but it's like the more interesting thing that they have a new reward signal that they sort of like re that we can really, really trust. Like when, you know…”
Mar 30, 2026 neutral
Lample: Long-horizon RL trajectories require new algorithms beyond GRPO
“GRPO, for instance, it doesn't really work with any bit of policy, which was okay initially, because you are solving math problems that can be solved in like a few thousand tokens, so the model can actually generate them pretty quickly, so when you do your upd…”