“Reinforcement learning is at the core of these large language models, because they do reinforcement learning from human feedback. … They try to please you too much. They won't tell you if you're wrong or something.”
Brain Inspired · AI Research & Frontier Labs · November 2026
Context
The host asked whether AI's lack of grounding makes its achievements more or less impressive. The guest says models do get some value shaping from human feedback, but calls that top layer very simple, and gives sycophancy as the result.
Transcript
more or less impressive, like what these models have been
able to do, right?
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, like, to be fair, there's some grounding and at the upper end. Like, one thing that I think isn't always talked about is how reinforcement learning is in the core of these large language models because they'll do this, you know, reinforcement learning from human feedback. And so you're kind of like training just like we train our own brains relative to our values, like what to represent and what's prominent and so forth. So there is a kind of top that's kind of generating these things. But it's very simple. There's this issue of like, I'm going to say this where they have anyway, they try to please you too much. Like, they won't tell you if you're wrong or something. These AI models are because they're just trained. Yeah, that's.
Was that the word? Yeah. Yeah,
I think that's it. They're so that they're just, their training objective is just to like make you happy in the moment, basically. But
that, but that comes externally, right? Where our values are internally generated.
More from Brain Inspired
