EP357: Copying Smart Experts Makes AI Worse

Title: Compete Then Collaborate: Frontier AI Teachers Build a Verifiable Curriculum to Improve a Coding Student Beyond ImitationSource: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08255v1Summary:This work delivers a foundational breakthrough in LLM post-training by demonstrating that traditional supervised fine-tuning on teacher-generated data can degrade capable student models, whereas reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) using a collaborative teacher-built curriculum yields significant reasoning gains. It establishes a robust, reproducible paradigm for training frontier models through verification and active learning rather than simple imitation.