The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]

zuzuen_1

"We make a tentative calibration of the self-sustaining ac celeration condition using the existing data that is available, measuring AI capabilities using the Epoch Capabilities Index (Ho et al., 2025). We find that the condition is met if a one-unit increase in AI model capabilities results in at least 15% higher AI R&D pro ductivity. A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation based on reported AI engineer uplift suggests this return has been around 9% since the launch of coding agents. This number is below the model-implied threshold, suggesting we are not experiencing a self-sustaining acceleration." And the source of this data seems to be self-reported productivity gains from surveys: 1.4–2X in METR’s survey of technical workers (Becker, 2026). A bit flimsy basis but an interesting paper nonetheless.

Mistletoe

When I hear recursive self improvement all I remember are the ridiculous articles a few years ago about how 3d printers were going to make themselves and take over the world.

vatsachak

RSI isn't anything new though; computers have been used to make computers better for about 80 years now. Imagine having a secretary who could read 1 million records and give you back your answer in 100 microseconds, for just 10 cents an hour. That's Postgres. So I'd imagine that if R&D can be automated, everything becomes better and cheaper but we'd all lose our jobs, as secretaries did to postgres. UBI season

reader9274

First thing I thought when reading the title was "is this about those never ending self-help books?"

charcircuit

>Best evidence in favor of acceleration: It's important to recognize that LLMs accelerating development of LLMs does not imply it will lead to self-sustaining acceleration.

godelski

> But our models make it clear that such an [intelligence] explosion may not follow if there are diminishing returns (“ideas become harder to find”) or if feedback loops become bottlenecked. How is this not obvious to everyone? As we advance it becomes more difficult to advance. You obviously make most advancements around the things that are easiest to improve. Then all the easy things are done. So you go onto the next easiest things. They're "the easy things" from that standpoint but that doesn't mean they aren't harder than "the easy things" when you started. Complexity increases as precision increases.