RL ENVIRONMENTS AND THE HIERARCHY OF AGENTIC CAPABILITIES

Summary from the TLDR AI newsletter

Researchers dropped nine frontier AI models into a simulated workplace environment and gave them 150 jobs to do. Most of the AIs were barely coherent, and even the best lacked common sense. The experiment showed how models must acquire more fundamental capabilities before we can even begin to discuss how well they perform common-sense reasoning in real environments. Finding out whether common sense reasoning is a set of identifiable, trainable sub-skills or an emergent property of large-scale real-world training will help shape the next stage of AI development.