Why RL Won — Kyle Corbitt, OpenPipe (acq. CoreWeave)
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What is Kyle’s background and how did he start OpenPipe?
Hey everyone, welcome to the Live in Space Podcast. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by Swix, editor of
Hello, hello. And we're so excited to have Kyle finally in the studio. Welcome. Hey. I'm very excited to be here. Uh Kyle, you're CEO founder. Uh yeah. Uh co founder, CEO, yeah. Of OpenPipe, which uh started two years ago and recently got acquired by Core Weave. Congrats. Thanks. Uh where I think you might be our first like started and exited founder that we've had on the pod, maybe. I don't know.
Especially on that timeline.
Well, I don't think I was exited when we I don't remember if it w if uh we set this up before or after we um announced we were getting acquired.
specifically pinged you because uh you got I think you got acquired. You've been on my list uh to watch. Obviously you've spoken three times at AIE and you've been on my list of like when is it a good time to have an open pipe or fine tuning RL discussion and then you got acquired and I'm like okay yeah that's a that's a good that's a good time to talk about it. Also because I think like it gives us a window to talk about acquisitions, consolidation, like what should be an independent company, what what maybe it doesn't have to be. Anyway, but we'll we'll maybe do this chronologically so we don't we don't get too far ahead of ourselves. You were famously director of startup school. Yes. Maybe for people who don't know, like what what is startup school?
Did that make you become like fall in love with the color orange? Yes,
I'm I'm wearing an orange shirt for those who are listening, a very bright orange shirt. So yes, I was at I was at Y Combinator for about four and a half years and led the startup school team there. So startup school, it's it's changed over the years. It meant one thing before I was there, it means another thing now. But during the time I was at YC, Startup School was basically all of the external facing A lot of the content, certainly all of the tech. So it was it was things like we had a like like a MOOC effectively where founders could come in, they could learn about how to start a company, they could get advice from YC founders, YC partners. We had a co-founder matching uh service that we built, which actually worked really well.
Um we got a lot of of people through. Our total, like, you know, I I guess technically I can't, that probably doesn't matter anymore, but a very large fraction of the background. patches that went through Y C while I was there um were directly attributable to people that we found and and ended up recruiting to Y C um through their experience too at at Starp School. So that was kind of what we were working on.
Yeah, I was g I I always kinda c consider it as like the the scout program for Y C. Yeah. Right. Like the Y C before the Y C. Any notable, like famous people that that met as part of your co founder match matching 'cause I'm always very negative on those things because like it's like online dating. Like the the chances of success is super low. Yeah. But when it works it it's really nice.
You know, that's a great question. I left so we launched that product probably nine months before I left, and so I don't know what the the long term outcomes were of that specifically.
Yeah. So you left YC, you spent a year in the kind of the wilderness, you went to YC uh S twenty three. Mm-hmm. Uh what's that journey like? What's the You know I was very excited about
AI things in general. Um, this was so I left YC, I guess, uh beginning of twenty twenty two. And I was trying out a bunch of different things. Um, ended up landing on what turned into open pipe in early 2023. This was uh, let's see. So I'd been working, so my my co founder is my brother, um my little brother, which has been fun journey on its own. We were looking at different ideas and one thing we realized was we actually started the company immediately after The GPT 4 launch. And what we saw as the opportunity in the market at the time, which has changed since then, was GPT-4 was insanely expensive and extremely powerful.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Kyle’s background and how did he start OpenPipe?
0:04–7:44
2
Why did OpenPipe pivot from model distillation to reinforcement learning?
7:44–16:39
3
How does RULER enable RL training without complex reward engineering?
16:39–26:48
4
What are the biggest challenges when building sandbox environments for agents?
26:48–35:14
5
Why might GRPO be a dead‑end compared to PPO for RL training?
35:14–43:57
6
Why are LoRAs considered underrated for production deployments?
43:57–52:28
7
How did the acquisition by CoreWeave shape OpenPipe’s serverless RL platform?
52:28–1:01:07
8
What is the vision for continuous learning to make agents reliable at scale?
1:01:07–1:08:12
Speakers
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