Dan Pontecorvo

Dan Pontecorvo leads Jane Street’s physical engineering team, which designs, builds, and operates the firm’s physical spaces, including data centers and trading floors. His public technical work focuses on data center power, cooling, physical infrastructure, and the changing compute constraints introduced by machine learning workloads.

AlphaGo Shows How Search Can Turn RL Into Supervised Learning

Eric Jang rebuilds AlphaGo as a way to examine why its combination of search, value learning and self-play still matters for modern AI. His central claim is that AlphaGo’s Monte Carlo Tree Search turns each move into a better supervised-learning target, avoiding the long-horizon credit-assignment problem that makes much reinforcement learning for language models inefficient. Jang also argues that current LLM research assistants can already help execute and optimize experiments, but still struggle with the harder judgment of choosing which research paths are worth pursuing.

Dwarkesh PatelMay 15, 202628 min read