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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

A tangent, but I’m now realizing that the “recursive self improvement” thing that these LLM companies are talking about is (probably?) not about unsupervised Claude Code instances improving the training process, but rather LLMs modifying their own weights through tooling directly. It would certainly open up a whole new process for model optimization.

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I was just watching a video about this. They had this survey question for AI researchers asking when they think AI would take their job. The reason they asked this was that would be the point where AI starts recursive self improvement. If it’s able to replace the job of an AI researcher, then it could keep improving itself.

This is a tautology.

Instead of just asking the researchers when RSI would be achieved? Sneeky!

I don't know how much we learn by surveying working "AI researchers". By their own admission most of them have a religious belief that they will bring about a singularity in the next few years. It's like asking a billionaire if he earned his wealth; regardless of what you think the answer is, you pretty much know how they will answer ahead of time.

Recursive self improvement permits recursion at any level of abstraction as long as k > 1.0 (much like supercriticality in nuclear reactions, which iirc is where the earlier term for RSI, “intelligence explosion”, comes from - substitute intelligence in for neutrons and it is the same math with similar apocalyptic implications).

It's obvious that recursive self-improvement has been happening and accelerating quickly for some time.

AI coding assistants make it much easier to conduct experiments and improve AI models, which in turn improves the coding assistants etc.

That's "just" improvement, not recursive self improvement.

Yes but my point is that I never realized that the AI would be writing tools to update the weights directly, rather than improve the existing training process.

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