4 sources healthy · latest episode 9 Nov 2026
opinion claim

Optimization is well suited to abstract, hill-climbable problems when their goals are sufficiently specified, according to the speaker.

Tim Scarfe · AI 2040: Plan A report - Daniel Kokotajlo & Thomas Larsen · 8 Sep 2026

In their words

The transcript segments this claim was taken from

“you know, you're an engineer and this is your output and these are your metrics and you need to make the metrics go up. And we see everything in terms of like an optimization problem. And I always think that this is great for certain types of health.”
“Hill climbable abstract problems where we have enough of a specification.”
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