RSI: The New AGI Buzzword in AI Research
Recursive self-improvement (RSI) has become the latest buzzword in AI, with startups like Recursive Superintelligence, founded by Richard Socher, explicitly pursuing it. Alex Karpathy's Auto-Research project uses agent swarms to train LLMs on simple tasks, while Adaption, founded by Sara Hooker, launched AutoScientist for automating frontier training. Disarray's Doris Xin's self-trained agent won 28 medals in a Kaggle competition. Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged progress but stated RSI is not yet achieved. Anthropic's Claude Code reportedly wrote close to 100% of its team's code, and a survey indicated five of 18 engineers believed Mythos could replace an L4 engineer. However, weaknesses in self-direction remain. Helen Toner of CSET distinguishes RSI from merely using AI tools, citing Ayeja Cotra's milestones: adequacy, parity, and supremacy. Cotra expects adequacy within a couple years and supremacy within a year after parity. Toner notes that scaling RSI faces challenges in engineering and alignment, and like AGI, full RSI is not yet realized.
Key facts
- RSI stands for Recursive self-improvement, a concept where AI continuously upgrades itself.
- Richard Socher launched Recursive Superintelligence with RSI as an explicit goal.
- Alex Karpathy is working on Auto-Research using agent swarms to train LLMs on simple tasks.
- Sara Hooker's Adaption launched AutoScientist to automate frontier training.
- Doris Xin's self-trained machine learning agent won 28 medals in a Kaggle competition.
- Google CEO Sundar Pichai said RSI represents a next level of acceleration but is not yet achieved.
- Anthropic's Claude Code wrote close to 100% of its team's code, and five of 18 engineers believed Mythos could replace an L4 engineer.
- Helen Toner of CSET distinguishes RSI from merely using AI tools, citing Ayeja Cotra's milestones of adequacy, parity, and supremacy.
Entities
Institutions
- Recursive Superintelligence
- TechCrunch
- Tesla
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- Cohere
- Adaption
- Disarray
- Kaggle
- Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET)
- METR