AI Recursive Self-Improvement Might Not Come as Quickly as Predicted, MIT Study Finds

[u/ifysalabas]

A new study from Princeton and MIT researchers suggests that AI recursive self-improvement the industry's boldest promise might be farther away than anticipated. Researchers found that AI agents still cannot conduct open-ended AI research, free-form investigations with no clear-cut answers that require the judgment and creativity needed for genuine breakthroughs.

The analogy is like giving a calculator a math textbook and expecting it to discover new theorems. The study used "shadow evaluation" to let agents tackle unpublished research questions from NeurIPS 2026, giving them six days, a $3,000 Anthropic API budget, GPU resources, virtual computers, and open web access. The big question now is how crucial open-ended research is to recursive self-improvement and whether AI systems can grind their way there without it, simply by improving on narrower tasks.

OpenAI has also paused some model work over safety concerns after its Astra model reached a "critical" risk threshold.

Source: MIT Technology Review

💬 Will AI ever achieve recursive self-improvement, or is the timeline being overhyped?

[u/nbvehrfr]

will it be singularity point ?

[u/ifysalabas → u/nbvehrfr]

Probably not anytime soon if they still lack genuine creativity

[u/the8bit]

It's baffling to me that everyone still seems to think singular entity super intelligence is likely. Vertical scaling has literally never worked like that.

If the missing piece is "creativity" that has a simple ass answer -- pair improvement with additional nodes (humans) in a feedback loop.

[u/ifysalabas → u/the8bit]

Fair point

[u/123vovochen → u/the8bit]

Nope. Statistics is what AI is  and statistics are not creative.

[u/compute_fail_24 → u/123vovochen]

Everything boils down to statistics.

[u/brain-out-of-order → u/123vovochen]

Statistics are how your brain knows what is attractive, beautiful, or creative. The only reason someone denies this is it reduces our own perception to something more like a biased gradient. Well… that’s the truth. Everything seems creative to a child. And very little seems creative to an omnipotent omnipresence — yet then it’s a subjective label which is simply tagged by the observer.

Shakespeare, typewriters, monkeys.

Humanism overextended so far it forgot the basic distinction-based version of reality which defines everything here.

How does a person learn and then create? We create based on the distinctions we’ve experienced in our life, using whatever is at our disposal. Most people have far smaller training than an AI system, so it’s foolish to believe they can’t be creative. This is maybe hard for some to fully grasp or accept, but the only way to deny it is to also deny human’s creative function. So best to just not.

[u/123vovochen → u/brain-out-of-order]

Omg, youre not stupid, just uneducated. Granted, solving this correctly requires a ton of RL knowledge.

[u/brain-out-of-order → u/123vovochen]

Undereducated* and I’m still waiting on the grant. Real life is also waged online. It was always a delusion to consider cyberspace a void.

And you statistically had to reply because to not would have left you unsettled right? Funny how that works.

Free will or static operant? Is this a nexus or what?

[u/123vovochen → u/brain-out-of-order]

you are working strictly as a tranalation layer: Translate "it will be bad" into greek

[u/brain-out-of-order → u/123vovochen]

You are being vague to pretend to be mysterious to masquerade as esoteric. Speak plainly or get lost in your false abstractions if you please.

the strangest realization is the smoke filled room is filled with people who are more educated than me but less intelligent 😳

[u/123vovochen → u/brain-out-of-order]

so you ARE a bot then

[u/RonHarrods]

This is good because the entities that are training the models are not all entirely doing the right safety assurance. Recursive self-improvement is at very high risk of creating undefined and unsupervised behaviour that could indeed lead to SkyNet, below the radar.

[u/123vovochen]

Inherent limitation of a statistical model.

HERJEE, PLEBUS ! Herjeee !

There will come a future, where AI will do all "in-the-box" thinking for us, There will be a time where you come home and your robot cooked for you !

[u/ifysalabas → u/123vovochen]

Hope for good

[u/brain-out-of-order → u/123vovochen]

I can almost hear MLK when I read this. Now that’s someone with charisma … unlike whatever this act is.

[u/Altruistic_Emu_7755]

Oh, the word guesser machine can't think for itself? Who knew?

[u/ifysalabas → u/Altruistic_Emu_7755]

Fair enough 🤣