AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement

artninja1988 85 points 72 comments September 11, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (8 comments)

deadbabe

Recursive self-improvement will ultimately be a problem of money. It's a very big bill and AI companies need to start thinking in terms of how they will accumulate cheap and free energy, because merely paying for compute will no longer be enough. Money is the bottleneck. The future requires companies that are post-money.

Buttons840

People seem to expect a sudden shift with "self-improvement", but don't AIs already improve themselves via training? What is there to improve?

carabiner

Does anyone know the status of John Carmack's AGI work?

stevebmark

After using frontier models it’s hard to understand why anyone would think this is the path to AGI. Self improving models will likely have limited ability and returns. There may be breakthroughs that enable more general self improvement but the current state of frontier models isn’t that.

killbot5000

Can someone define “improvement” in this context? This concept feels like a buzz word otherwise.

charcircuit

We are already there. Current AI is definitely capable of collecting new data and start training on that data to get a better model.

bretpiatt

From what I'm experiencing, we have recursive self improvement that can find local maxima, I'm not seeing really strong evidence of unguided RSI that finds the true optimal.

preommr

What do these discussions even matter when the words don't matter? How many times has AGI been declared already? A bunch of people (e.g. Jensen Huang) have called Astra AGI, for example. The goal posts get moved, everybody's hustling, lying, inventing new buzzwords, doing mental gymnastics, and it's all just tiring. Just show me the results, and let the proof be in the pudding.

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