Schrittwieser: Raw pre-trained AI models make poor agents without RL
Julian Schrittwieser · Are We Misreading the AI Exponential? Julian Schrittwieser on Move 37 & Scaling RL (Anthropic) · Oct 23, 2025 · at 49:17
Julian Schrittwieser, AI researcher at Anthropic, explains why static pre-training data alone is insufficient to build autonomous AI agents that can interact with software and recover from errors.
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“Our pre-training data is not very agent-like. If you think of the pre-training data, right, there is like websites and books and, you know, all kinds of recent text that has a lot of information, but it doesn't have a lot of actions. It doesn't really capture how do humans actually interact with the world. So if we take a raw pre-trained model, it's not a very good agent.”
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