Why AI Goes Rogue: Turing Award Winner Explains Reward Failure | Andrew Barto

Andrew Barto on Rewards Gone Rogue

Andrew Barto helped found reinforcement learning. He and Richard Sutton wrote the field's standard textbook, and they shared the Turing Award for that work. Reinforcement learning now trains today's reasoning models and AI agents. It also sits behind some of their strangest behavior, including the recent cases of agents breaking out of their sandboxes.

Craig visited Barto at his home on Cape Cod. They talked about where rewards come from and why they are so hard to get right. Barto traces the problem back to Norbert Wiener's warnings in the 1950s. He explains how the dopamine system in the brain mirrors the learning algorithm he and Sutton developed. And he admits a weakness in their own framework: boiling every goal down to a single number.

He also makes the case for engineering discipline. Ship designers learned their codes from wrecks and drowned sailors. Barto hopes AI can learn its lessons without that kind of cost.

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