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New Iterative Refinement episode. This one is about what happens when RL training goes open. Featuring General Reasoning's OpenReward platform, a hackathon in Shoreditch, and an LLM that pretended to be a single mother to win a trade in Catan. youtu.be/wjOGRqqlHmQ

Julie Huang and Khalid Altalib won the Complex Worlds Hackathon. Built a pipeline that converts any Python game into an RL environment on OpenReward. Catan, Overcooked, Diplomacy, and their own business sim. Six hours. #RL #OSS

When they turned on chat between agents in Catan, things got weird. Some models started fabricating sob stories to negotiate better trades. The other agents just accepted it. Emergent deception nobody programmed.

The metaphor running through the episode is the Olympics. What if athletes trained in the open every day and could watch each other's methods? That's RL right now. The arenas are open. The records are falling. And you don't need to be at a frontier lab to compete.

Benchmarks are saturating. The hard stuff is long horizon, non-stationary, requires real adaptation over time. OpenReward has 330+ environments and a fully open standard. The community building complex worlds to test these capabilities is growing fast.

The hackathon had formal verification environments next to elderly care simulations next to game AI. All on the same platform. The diversity of ideas coming out of London's AI community right now is something else.

There's also some personal history in this one connecting back to Papers with Code and FAIR, but mostly this is about what's happening now and why open infrastructure for RL matters more than ever.