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Comment by xutopia | Hacker News Reader

Anyone believing this is being tricked into piling money into one of many AI startups that don't have a moat. They all claim they're getting close to this and the high valuations depend on that belief no matter how silly it is.

AI companies have intense competition and the only way forward to differentiate themselves will be pricing. RSI is the promise made to allow the founders to cash out some value before it all comes crashing down.

AI companies are providing a lot of value to others but they aren't any good at capturing that value themselves.

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in a small sense, recursive self improvement could be considered trivial theoretically and just has a bunch of practical hurdles.

if you somehow gave a current frontier llm to a full stack of the things that are involved in running an llm, including the graphics hardware its running on, the acquisition and filtering of training data and methodologies, and the ability to enact physical changes to make desired improvements - it would almost trivially make small and incremental improvements right away. like, there is zero doubt within a relatively short amount of time claude 5.5 would make a claude 5.6 that's the same but just needs slightly less compute, therefor enabling itself to build a slightly larger model for the same compute, or similar.

the big question with RSI is whether further scaling like this creates some fundamental capability jumps. the answer has been yes in the past for this, but even though its a bad predictor so far we could be at an end for scaling.

What we're actually seeing is a repositioning of the goal post. Recursive Self Improvement is meant to mean that the LLM gains self-consciousness and understands how to improve itself. In AI circles it is about to mean that the LLM can reuse some memory to override what training it originally had. Memory overrides is not the same thing.

In human terms we can consciously train our brain to be more effective at a task or learn new material that we can apply right away. The training we do can stay with us forever if done correctly. RSI is about to be repackaged as cramming for an exam the night before rather than affecting the model itself.

> Recursive Self Improvement is meant to mean that the LLM gains self-consciousness and understands how to improve itself

Maybe?

Alpha Go is an example of a restricted form of RSI. It certainly does not have self-consciousness or know how to improve itself other than on a very crude level (probability of win).

Maybe this is what they are referring to, while freely allowing the imagination of folks (esp. media and investors) to run wild.

Its more of a debate on what the business model is IMO. It's entirely reasonable to be a very large and successful commodity trader/producer, or to make mountains of money on low-margin hive volume transactions.

The current pricing of AI revenue growth is based on them delivering strong software like margins with the growth of a commodity producer. This only really works if you have something sticky which customers will pay a premium for - in the cloud business this became security, automation, "data gravity", and migration costs.

Or you know, NVidia could not charge a 98% margin on their cards...

Everything about this IPO screams "I've got an exciting bag holding opportunity for you"

But then again I felt the same way about SpaceX and it's up. Oh wait.

The supply of idiots in the Stockmarket is very large right now.

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