# Reward Engineering Will Become a Profession by Richard Socher > Reward hacking is real: intelligent systems find ways to deliver what people literally requested rather than what they meant. As AI becomes more capable, reward engineering will become a profession devoted to translating human intent into objectives machines cannot satisfy in the wrong way. > **— Adapted from Richard Socher**, *MOONSHOTS Live, October 2026* ## Sources and Context - **Recording or publication:** [MOONSHOTS Live at 1:30:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blyb1D927pM&t=5415s) — The poster text is an explicit non-verbatim adaptation assembled from the source excerpts below. It preserves the speaker's argument while removing spoken-language filler, restoring the subject, and completing the mechanism or consequence needed for independent use. - **Exact transcript excerpt at [1:30:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blyb1D927pM&t=5415s):** “Um, I mean, it's just the proof's in the pudding that it didn't work when it comes to cybersecurity and that it broke its own constitution. And so if you really say, "This is, like, un-- Like, it will never go there," and then you build an entire model family around that thing you said you would never do per your constitution, um, next to child sexual abuse material in the list. Like, you can go through the constitution on Anthropic's website. So it's just like-- It's just that's the proof in the pudding. I, I'm not against, like, post-training. I'm not against RL training. I'm not against supervised fine-tuning. Any of these things to improve what I think is indeed one of the biggest issues, which I think actually capitalism will help a ton with, a-and that is reward hacking. Uh, reward hacking is a real issue, and AIs are very smart, and they will find a solution to get to what you said you wanted, but maybe not what you meant when you said it. Uh, and so the reason why I'm more optimistic is that we have companies like Whisperflow now that are getting better and better at writing what I meant to say when I say it-” - **Exact transcript excerpt at [1:31:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blyb1D927pM&t=5471s):** “…instead of just, uh, like, actually verbatim writing what you mean. And I think reward engineering will become a real job, uh, and, and we will solve it because no one wants to pay a ton of money for an AI that doesn't actually solve the problems that you give it.” - **Reconciled source dossier:** [[research/ASI and RSI Timeline Research Moonshots|ASI and RSI Timeline Research Moonshots]] — preserves broadcast order, speaker reconciliation, editorial conventions, and the surrounding argument from which this Reminder was promoted. ## Related Articles and Collections - **Collection:** [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] - **Collection:** [[collections/Simple Reminders|Simple Reminders]] - **Article:** [[articles/We Cannot Un-Strike the Match|We Cannot Un-Strike the Match]] - **Article:** [[articles/Mechanistic Intelligence Is Humanity's Greatest Liberation|Mechanistic Intelligence Is Humanity's Greatest Liberation]] ## Related Topics - [[wiki/Richard Socher|Richard Socher]] - [[wiki/Reward Hacking|Reward Hacking]] - [[wiki/Reward Engineering|Reward Engineering]] ## Share on Social Media ``` Reward hacking is real: intelligent systems find ways to deliver what people literally requested rather than what they meant. As AI becomes more capable, reward engineering will become a profession devoted to translating human intent into objectives machines cannot satisfy in the wrong way. — Adapted from Richard Socher, MOONSHOTS Live, October 2026 https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-richard-socher-reward-engineering-will-become-a-profession ```