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John Schulman quote, Sep 11, 2026

Chief Scientist, Thinking Machines Lab · Sep 11, 2026 · Interview, Dwarkesh Podcast: AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement

Basically anything that can be learned through RL can be distilled very easily, because it’s a small number of bits.

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Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

More from John Schulman

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In fact, I remember in the early OpenAI days having the intuition that just minimizing log loss wasn’t going to get you to intelligence.Sep 11, 2026· Interview
Right now, you don’t get explosive growth in capabilities because you still get bottlenecked enough when you’re trying to do research and engineering.Sep 11, 2026· Interview
So I would expect that we’re nowhere near the ceiling of how well you can do research.Sep 11, 2026· Interview
Even in one or two years, we'll find that the models can do a lot more involved tasks than they can do now.May 15, 2024· Interview
Given the relatively small number of entities who could train the largest models, it does seem possible to coordinate.May 15, 2024· Interview
If AGI came way sooner than expected we would definitely want to be careful about it.May 15, 2024· Interview

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An AI with more real layers can actually be “smarter” in the conventional sense of the term.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
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The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
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About this quote
Said by
John Schulman, Chief Scientist, Thinking Machines Lab
Where
Dwarkesh Podcast: AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement
Topics
Research, Open-source
Company
Thinking Machines Lab
Source
dwarkesh.com/p/john-beren-charlie

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