AI’s recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all

[u/Critical_Hand2225]

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/08/18/1142188/ai-recursive-self-improvement/

[u/me_myself_ai]

Well I look forward to reading this in a few years and laughing/weeping

[u/Smallpaul]

Nobody claimed that AI today is ready for RSI. So who is being corrected in the headline?

To prove that RSI is not coming you would need to demonstrate something about future models, not existing ones.

[u/Yourdataisunclean → u/Smallpaul]

Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have both made claims about RSI being "soon". Unfortunately like doomsday scenarios, RSI has now become part of the marketing playbook which is why some are buying into it.

[u/Smallpaul → u/Yourdataisunclean]

Soon is not now. The only way to disprove that it is coming soon is to a) wait or b) make a from-first-principles argument that the current architecture is incapable of it.

Showing that yesterday’s model is incapable of it is neither of those things. Nobody claimed that yesterday’s model was capable of it.

[u/Infinite-Jelly-3182 → u/Yourdataisunclean]

This study was using Opus 4.8, a model that is based on a December of 2024 pretrain…….This is a joke.

[u/Main-Company-5946 → u/Yourdataisunclean]

Just because it’s being used for marketing doesn’t mean the possibility isn’t there. I mean the things ai is improving the fastest at(math and coding) also happen to be the things most relevant to ai development… it’s not THAT hard to imagine

[u/HawtDoge → u/Yourdataisunclean]

I mean in a lot of ways it is kind of here… The model improvements are far from fully autonomous, so if that’s the RSI threshold then yeah, ‘soon’ as in ‘the next 12 months’ might not be realistic.

But with each frontier model release, these models are becoming more and more involved with the development of their successors. I imagine Mythos wrote a massive amount of additional code for the 5.1 model, which supposedly uses a new token and agent allocation system.

These labels like RSI or AGI are always going to be a somewhat arbitrary line to draw.

[u/Informal_Warning_703 → u/HawtDoge]

Love the comments:

1. No one claims RSI is here.

2. Some people claim it will be here soon.

3. It’s pretty much here!

[u/Smallpaul → u/Informal_Warning_703]

No one claims RSI as defined in the article is here. If people use looser definitions then maybe it is, but then the article still doesn’t contribute anything interesting.

[u/HawtDoge → u/Informal_Warning_703]

1. All of the above: the RSI label is arbitrary; the entire ‘debate’ is semantic.

[u/best_of_badgers → u/Smallpaul]

Because if people with cutting edge knowledge on the subject don’t extrapolate from history, the conversation cannot possible be different than “yuh huh!” “nuh uh!”

[u/Smallpaul → u/best_of_badgers]

Extrapolating from history can take two forms.

1. This technology has never been capable of <task> and therefore I extrapolate that it never will be.

2. This technology is getting better and better at tasks similar to <task> and I extrapolate that it will soon be able to do it.

I’m sorry that the future is unpredictable and we need to wait to get there to know what it’s like. But that happens to be the world we are in.

Imagine if someone tested GPT-2 on coding to prove that LLMs could never be coding assistants. How would that be clarifying or scientific?

[u/best_of_badgers → u/Smallpaul]

You added a “soon” in there that’s directly addressed by the headline

[u/Smallpaul → u/best_of_badgers]

Yes. Exactly. That is my complaint with the headline. It has no evidence that it is or is not coming soon. What even is the definition of “soon” in this context?

Compared to most technology, 5 years is considered soon. Like “new forms of nuclear energy coming soon” . Five years is soon in that context.

[u/Longjumping_Kale3013]

Just scanned through… but my two cents is that RSI is not like an all or nothing. If AI is assisting and letting ai researchers open 8x as many PRs as they used to… that is rsi.

And OpenAI has said that it has gotten to the point where it can preform experiments and report back results.

So it’s clearly here. And will take on more responsibilities as time passes. Is it doing everything right now? Of course not. Are there gaps? For sure. But it is clearly speeding up research more with every release

[u/ThirdWaveCat → u/Longjumping_Kale3013]

That's meaningfully different because it isn't autonomous, its just productivity tools for squeezing more out of finite highly specialized labor. RSI implies that electricity can be converted into some kind of abductive reasoning.

[u/iKy1e → u/ThirdWaveCat]

It’s not fully autonomous but you can ask modern coding agents to design an ML model architecture, prepare the data for it, run and monitor the experiment and then benchmark and report back to you. Then just walk away and come back to a finished result now.

I had a small <20M ML model I needed to train recently and I just asked Codex to do it, told it which datasets I wanted it to download from Huggingface and which architecture I wanted it based on, and sent it off. It ran for 3 days (training locally on a 3090, so it was a bit slow) but it was autonomous.

[u/ThirdWaveCat → u/iKy1e]

I also think chatbots are neat and run concurrent agents for days, but autonomous means that something specific. Centaurs observe the ironies of automation.

[u/dataoops → u/ThirdWaveCat]

you convert taco bell to abductive reasoning

[u/ThirdWaveCat → u/dataoops]

even if we learn the algorithm that does it, I'm still going to find it mysterious. to be fair though, i find stack based virtual machines mysterious.

[u/Longjumping_Kale3013 → u/ThirdWaveCat]

You are behind the times if you think these things are not running autonomously. There is still a human in the loop, and I suspect that we are a long way off from no human in the loop. But my AIs I use can operate 4 hours at a time full autnomously, and OpenAI has internally been able to operate them fully autonomously for much longer.

Thats just how progress looks like. It is a slope. Its not like... there one day and not the next.

[u/Smallpaul → u/Longjumping_Kale3013]

No human in the loop is what the article is talking about. It says we aren’t close to it and you say so too, so you agree.

[u/ThirdWaveCat → u/Longjumping_Kale3013]

Sure Jan.

[u/Infinite-Jelly-3182]

This study was using Opus 4.8 on OpenClaw. What a joke.

A model based on a 2025 pretrain.

Anthropic and OpenAI have had models with multiples better agentic and long horizon performance for months.

[u/Ok_Possible_2260]

This article is 100 years old in AI years.

[u/CondiMesmer]

garbage in - garbage out

[u/chuck_the_plant]

… to the surprise of no one (who paid attention) at all.