these just need more compute:

- earn $100: easy to verify, hard to learn

- increase paid subscriptions in an A/B test: easy to verify, hard to learn

but we both know these examples go against the spirit of my point

Perhaps, but I think a bigger problem than lack of compute is the cost of rewards. Games like Chess and Go were solved long before self-driving, partly because it's incredibly cheap to acquire the reward of a bad board game decision, relatively to how expensive it is to acquire the cost of a bad driving decision. With driving, acquiring the reward can cost you $20/hr for human supervisors to generate disengagements, or $100k if you crash, or $30B if you crash the car into a person in a way that causes your company to collapse (e.g., Cruise).