Re:GPT-OSS Reinforcement Learning
by mountainriver on Saturday September 27, 2025 @10:41AM
(#45396116)
This is a deeply untrue statement echoed by a lot of people unfortunately.
There was a post the other day on HN where a dev spent $2k doing RL on an open model and beat the frontier models on Web Voyager.
Research is packed with examples like this yet we keep hearing from the community that training doesn’t work.
Then consider voice/vision modalities where context engineering doesn’t work well at all. I just spent 2 years on the computer use problem and can tell you with absolute certainty that context won’t get you there (we tried and tried). The only thing that meaningfully moved the needle was RL.
I really wish this idea that only big labs can train models would die. It’s really hurting the ecosystem at this point.
There was a post the other day on HN where a dev spent $2k doing RL on an open model and beat the frontier models on Web Voyager.
Research is packed with examples like this yet we keep hearing from the community that training doesn’t work.
Then consider voice/vision modalities where context engineering doesn’t work well at all. I just spent 2 years on the computer use problem and can tell you with absolute certainty that context won’t get you there (we tried and tried). The only thing that meaningfully moved the needle was RL.
I really wish this idea that only big labs can train models would die. It’s really hurting the ecosystem at this point.