The Kafkaesque Squid Game is back and feels like a manifestation of Reinforcement Learning technique GRPO in action?

The word "Kafkaesque" has been on my mind lately, and after finishing Squid Game 2 this weekend, the dots connected. Kafkaesque describes situations that are bizarre, uncontrollable, and inescapable, where winning or overcoming seems impossible. This perfectly captures the feeling of being trapped in the Squid Game, with its arbitrary rules, deadly consequences, and dehumanizing atmosphere.

Around the same time, I was learning about the Deepseek model and its use of the GRPO (Group Relative Policy Optimization) reinforcement learning technique. GRPO promotes cooperation among AI agents, leading to diverse strategies and accelerated learning. This sparked a realization: Squid Game 2 is a manifestation of GRPO in action, with players forming alliances and adapting their strategies in unexpected ways.

Intrigued, I discussed this with Gemini. It highlighted how GRPO in a game like Squid Game could lead to rebellion, unexpected alliances, and even "meta-gaming" by the organizers to counter cooperative strategies. This refers to the organizers potentially changing the rules or manipulating the environment to maintain control.

This raises an important question: how do we mitigate the biases and risks of models trained with GRPO? As these models become more prevalent in various applications, we need to ensure fairness, transparency, and accountability. The risks are - bias amplification, lack of explainability, potential for misuse in adversarial applications and unintended consequences. Further research is crucial to develop appropriate safeguards and ensure responsible use of this powerful technique. While we celebrate model breakthroughs it is also important to recognize and plan for the new risks they will bring and how we plan for and prioritize trustworthy AI systems and application.

Full exchange with Gemini below, notice that the response about what to expect in season 3 is getting confused with the topic of AI and Human agency which is not the premise of the game at all but it was still a useful conversation. Enjoy 😊

Image generated by Nano Banana

Q: Is Squid Game Kafkaesque?