Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Current AI model leaderboards reward response style over actual factual correctness

Sebastian Raschka · State of LLMs 2026: RLVR, GRPO, Inference Scaling — Sebastian Raschka · Jan 29, 2026 · at 40:08

AI researcher Sebastian Raschka explains why model performance on public AI leaderboards often fails to translate into real-world performance gains.

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“It rewards the style more, more than the correctness because there is no correctness check.”

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Opinion
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“So it is a interesting direction to go into these diffusion, diffusion models as alternative to the auto regressive transformers, but it is not I would say the replacement at the state of the art.”
Sebastian Raschka Jan 29, 2026 ▶ 12:57 State of LLMs 2026: RLVR, GRPO, Inference Scaling — Sebastian Raschka
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Future LLMs will prioritize architectural efficiency over larger model sizes
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Pre-training is no longer where the low-hanging AI gains lie
“Pre-training is not dead, but pre-training is boring. So it's not where the low hanging fruit is anymore.”
Sebastian Raschka Jan 29, 2026 ▶ 17:32 State of LLMs 2026: RLVR, GRPO, Inference Scaling — Sebastian Raschka
Insight
RLVR unlocks pre-training knowledge rather than teaching LLMs new math
“The knowledge is already there in the pre-training, and this just unlocks it. It's just like a step that maybe shows the model how to use its own knowledge, basically.”
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Prediction Not checkable as stated
Process Reward Models will eventually become standard in LLM post-training
“I think it is promising and we will see it working at some point. I think it's just like right now it's still Tricky to make it work, but I am quite sure we'll see it as part of the standard repertoire at some point.”
Sebastian Raschka Jan 29, 2026 ▶ 26:39 State of LLMs 2026: RLVR, GRPO, Inference Scaling — Sebastian Raschka
Insight
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“That's where you make the bigger gains rather than scaling the model size. I think that's one of those things where you will see more progress coming from.”
Sebastian Raschka Jan 29, 2026 ▶ 28:04 State of LLMs 2026: RLVR, GRPO, Inference Scaling — Sebastian Raschka
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