RL is definitely really cool but I heavily doubt that we're gonna see 'hyper growth' from RL outside of the context of maybe training reasoning LLMs.
The period from ~2012-2019 of AI research had deepmind (who was the undisputed leader in money and talent) go all in on RL to solve problems and while they did do lots of interesting and useful work, there wasn't anything quite so extraordinary / revolutionary in massively accelerating the field or some sort of crazy breakthrough.
Their over-focus on RL instead of transformers/llms is what allowed OpenAI to surprise everyone and overtake deepmind.
Yes, RL is a useful tool, but outside the context of training LLMs for reasoning there isn't really any breakthrough that makes it more than an interesting tool for certain situations.
The period from ~2012-2019 of AI research had deepmind (who was the undisputed leader in money and talent) go all in on RL to solve problems and while they did do lots of interesting and useful work, there wasn't anything quite so extraordinary / revolutionary in massively accelerating the field or some sort of crazy breakthrough.
Their over-focus on RL instead of transformers/llms is what allowed OpenAI to surprise everyone and overtake deepmind.
Yes, RL is a useful tool, but outside the context of training LLMs for reasoning there isn't really any breakthrough that makes it more than an interesting tool for certain situations.