What Samuel Hammond thinks about scaling laws
Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.
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2 dated positions, 2025 to 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Samuel Hammond has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsIn short, RLVR gives us no reason to expect the normative representations learned in pre-training will acquire motivational force over a given action, especially when post-training repeatedly selects trajectories for terminal task success.
↗The Sorcerer’s Apprenticesecondbest.ca 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 14 months earlier
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Their wordsWhile the fact that merely scaling up AI models often results in qualitative leaps in performance may seem empirically mysterious, in retrospect it should be seen as a rational necessity.