In brief: large amounts of high quality process based RL might result in AI being more useful earlier (prior to them becoming much smarter). This might be expensive and annoying (e.g. it might require huge amounts of high quality human labor) such that by default labs do less of this relative to just scaling up models than would be optimal from a safety perspective.
You mention that society may do too little of the safer types of RL. Can you clarify what you mean by this?
In brief: large amounts of high quality process based RL might result in AI being more useful earlier (prior to them becoming much smarter). This might be expensive and annoying (e.g. it might require huge amounts of high quality human labor) such that by default labs do less of this relative to just scaling up models than would be optimal from a safety perspective.