What Chelsea Finn thinks about reinforcement learning

@chelsea-finn · 22 positions · On ppll ↗

Assistant professor of computer science at Stanford, and co-founder of the robot foundation-model company Physical Intelligence.

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Only Chelsea Finn on reinforcement learning. See everyone on reinforcement learning

2 dated positions, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Chelsea Finn has said — not written or endorsed by them.

2 positions so far — this page is not yet offered to search engines.

1. 12 Aug 2026

   Our readingReinforcement learning cannot be scaled for robots the way it was for language models, because every attempt spends real robot hours instead of data-centre compute.

   LLMsrobotics

   Their wordsNow maybe this isn't completely out of the question but this would be quite challenging uh to do and that's because the calculus is a little bit different. We're not just running compute to optimize for a use case. We're actually running the robot in the real world and using the hardware and attempting the task in the real world.

   ↗Chelsea Finn: This is the State of the Art in Roboticsyoutube.com 4th of 22 in this recording

3. 12 Aug 2026

   Our readingOne pre-trained robot model now matches or beats the specialists that were fine-tuned with reinforcement learning for the very tasks they were built for.

   scaling lawsrobotics

   Their wordswe see that the across the board the single PIO like pre-trained PIO7 model matches or outperforms the fine-tuned specialists that were developed with reinforcement learning post-training for those downstream tasks.

   ↗Chelsea Finn: This is the State of the Art in Roboticsyoutube.com 11th of 22 in this recording