AWS SageMaker Adds Multi-Turn RL for Specialized AI Model Training

This development allows streaming platforms to deploy more efficient, domain-specific AI for tasks like content recommendations or personalized user experiences without the computational burden of large foundation models. By specializing AI agents through multi-turn RL, companies can reduce operational costs and enhance accuracy, directly impacting areas like content discovery and targeted advertising within their ecosystems. Watch for benchmark comparisons showing smaller models achieving parity with or exceeding larger models on specific streaming-related workloads.

The introduction of multi-turn RL on SageMaker AI builds on Amazon's broader efforts to democratize and optimize AI agent development. In January 2026, Amazon Science detailed research demonstrating that reinforcement learning-based customization can significantly boost task success rates for AI agents, even with relatively small models and limited training data, a finding directly supported by this new SageMaker feature. This earlier research specifically highlighted agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and personal-assistant agents as key use cases. In May 2026, Amazon SageMaker AI also launched an AI agent experience, transitioning model customization from a months-long process to a workflow completed in days or hours for developers. This experience, leveraging coding agents like Kiro, Claude Code, and CoPilot, supports advanced customization techniques including RL for verifiable correctness. Additionally, AWS has been promoting Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to address reward signal challenges by using programmatic reward functions, improving training performance for tasks with verifiable outputs such as code generation or mathematical reasoning, per an AWS Machine Learning blog in April 2026. This comprehensive approach underscores Amazon's strategy to provide a suite of tools that simplify and accelerate the development of highly specialized and accurate AI agents across various industries, including streaming.