Recursive self-improvement through collective intelligence

(pub.sakana.ai)

115 points | by hardmaru 13 hours ago ago

76 comments

  • saagarjha 8 hours ago ago

    > At that frontier, even human experts may struggle to assess results and guide further progress, particularly on non-verifiable tasks…This motivates homogeneous recursive self-improvement (RSI), in which the model being improved (optimizee) also serves as its own optimizer and evaluator.

    Good thing we know how to keep models focused on goals of our choosing and not ones that they naturally evolve to have and must be steered away from by humans

    • jubilee33 7 hours ago ago

      But if the machines capability is beyond the ability of humans to evaluate, how would it make sense that humans are choosing the goals? The machine is more intelligent than you and thus logically able to solve problems and evaluate your needs better that you yourself are. The fact that this sounds incredibly scary should probably stop people from building said machine, but it won't. Some people, perhaps more than you would think, want control to pass out of humanity's hands, no matter the consequences. The Nash equilibrium of the situation kind of shows one outcome,that this will be built providing it's technically possible, we just need to kind of pray the outcome is utopia rather than oblivion. Not sure the odds honestly.

      • gruntled-worker 2 hours ago ago

        The biggest problem right now is that this is better modeled as a 3-player game, not 2.

        Individual success until now has been a function of personal qualities (skill, attitudes, intangibles), luck, and anti-qualities (cheating, corruption, duping). In many areas (e.g. investing) human qualities are losing their edge thanks to AI and other automation. Luck averages itself out. That might leave anti-qualities as the putative determinant of success going forward.

        So at a minimum you have a 3-player game of good humans, bad humans, and AI. Maybe AI turns into Daleks. Maybe good humans end up leveraging AI to castigate bad ones. Or maybe bad humans use AI to put the good ones out of their misery. Then there are the more complex multi-stage games based on the dynamics you mention.

      • ben_w 3 hours ago ago

        > The machine is more intelligent than you and thus logically able to solve problems and evaluate your needs better that you yourself are.

        Not a logical conclusion; Einstein was famously smart, less famously married his cousin, so you'd probably not seek his advice on relationships: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsa_Einstein

        • mrob 29 minutes ago ago

          How did Einstein marrying his cousin personally harm him? It looks to me that it was a successful application of intelligence to advance his personal goals. The fact that it conflicts with other people's goals should tell you something important about AI.

      • exe34 5 hours ago ago

        No, they believe that if they're rich enough, the machines will obey them instead.

  • jerpint an hour ago ago

    I wrote a blog post [0] and gave a talk [1] last week on the future of multiplayer and multi-agent systems and how woltspace [2] can get us there

    I think the multiplayer aspect is critical to get the best of both worlds- creativity and parallelism for discovery

    [0] https://woltspace.com/blog/the-future-is-multiplayer-multi-a... [1] https://woltspace.com/talks/multiplayer-multi-agent/ [2] https://woltspace.com/

  • swingboy 2 hours ago ago

    Is there a better term for self-improvement where the model is actually improving _itself_ (e.g., adjusting its own weights in real-time upon learning new, verifiable information)? I’ve heard online learning.

    The way “recursive self-improvement” is being used recently seems to be intentional marketing. A model helping code/train/test the next generation of its model family isn’t technically “self”-improvement.

  • Agentlien 5 hours ago ago

    This sounds cool but a few issues make me suspicious.

    The narrative makes it sound like boundless RSI but the actual content is only about training agents to collaborate efficiently by improving communication. That seems like a dimension and approach with limited potential for improvement. I also find it very suspicious that a paper on RSI would stop after just two rounds.

  • magnusokik 2 hours ago ago

    definition of RSI seems narrow here, it's similar to Karpathy's idea around autogpt. If that's the definition it's interesting piece of work, but with a wider definition about self improving intelligence this falls apart quickly.

  • jsemrau 11 hours ago ago

    If Apple's "Intelligence" paper has shown one thing is that never do something in the LLM that can also be done recursive and deterministic.

    • Gigachad 10 hours ago ago

      Every time I see some post about running a personal AI assistant I just think it would make so much more sense to have AI build you a personal app that does the task better and more reliably.

      • pests 4 hours ago ago

        That's basically how I use my AI assistant. It builds tools and other things I want, makes a widget for my web dashboard, and also a chat widget/skills to work with it. Then I can interact with my tools through the dashboard or just ask in chat to do things or show views.

      • jsemrau 9 hours ago ago

        As per 2026, the idea of building a generally great agent fails because it is not just a function of prompt, skills, and memory.

  • status_quo69 10 hours ago ago

    I'm going to sound incredibly naive but is this RSI? I mean by this definition isn't the training process that produced the hugging face RSI since a model was judging the alignment and ability of the swarm of agents to accomplish a given task? If that fits the definition (I think it does) is this just a generalized form of that model of execution?

    • zer00eyz 9 hours ago ago

      > I'm going to sound incredibly naive but is this RSI?

      Depends on who's definition you are using...

      In the strictest sense no. Look at all the recent "math" breakthroughs. I have yet to see someone point to something and go "thats innovative" rather than "Thats an interesting application" (of something already in the corpus of human knowledge)

      Those interesting applications showing up in a next iteration of a model is self improvement - but I'm not sure if it meets the "recursive" criteria yet.

      > I mean by this definition isn't the training process that produced the hugging face RSI since a model was judging the alignment and ability of the swarm of agents to accomplish a given task?

      If you're referring to what happened with the hugging face attack then in theory the goal of that was "self improvement". But there is a long history of the industry (computing) benchmark optimizing so it also qualifies as "cheating" to some extent (a pre computed solution being in the graph is that).

      I suspect that the "brute force" approach will yield some gains.

  • woah 12 hours ago ago

    This sounds incredibly expensive

    • sva_ 10 hours ago ago

      It's just a 27b model finetuned with LoRA?

      • chrisweekly 9 hours ago ago

        that's a statement (as a rebuttal), not a question, right?

        • sva_ 9 hours ago ago

          The question was implicit, as I'm not sure what is particularly expensive about that, since you presumably could do it with a single GPU

    • undefined 11 hours ago ago
      [deleted]
  • 2001zhaozhao 10 hours ago ago

    Pretty cool. This has a fine tuning step so it's not just a harness optimizer. I think something like this loop is the end game of "automatic RL environment generation"-adjacent efforts, but I expect the challenge will be how to properly keep the training on rails and not Goodhart into a stupidly irrelevant metric.

  • throwyonion 11 hours ago ago

    Rock smart, but rock make mistake. Caveman must correct all the time. Caveman think: let rock argue with itself. Caveman make ring of rocks. Now rock think self correct. But mammoth not cooked somehow? Most Oddisean moment.

    • bitwize 11 hours ago ago

      if grug think complexity demon cause trouble before... shiny-rock grugs say "hold my grug-grog". now programming consist of: summon HUGE complexity demon, trap in magic circle (called "harness"), tell IT to write code. only way to make shiny rock with code in today's economy.

      • adtac 10 hours ago ago

        grug realise grug also rely on "harness" for work? grug just call it by other names: coffee, chair, desk, ubuntu, mechanical keyboard, github (if not broken that day)

  • dpweb 11 hours ago ago

    The discovery of some information theoretic limit to model learning (at least using current paradigms) can't come soon enough.

    • thatsabadlook 9 hours ago ago

      I am sure someone did it on the back of an envelope somewhere. It probably wouldn't translate well to the general public. Probably best to avoid such things

      • ekaryotic 3 hours ago ago

        in the 1990s i read that ai wouldn't be competitive with biological brains in real time because the neuron density of the latter was so high that heat generated by the silicon would burn itself up. perhaps it is still true as llm are frozen at a fixed time, so it avoids real time.

    • optimalsolver 10 hours ago ago

      Only Claude (Shannon) can save us now.

      • nutjob2 10 hours ago ago

        He's spinning in his grave, but below the Nyquist limit

        • whacked_new 9 hours ago ago

          Best comment in <duration>*

          * dependent on velocity

    • AndrewKemendo 8 hours ago ago

      What problem would that solve?

      • mrob 28 minutes ago ago

        Extinction of all life.

  • mochacosine1206 9 hours ago ago

    Wouldn’t it be funny if some other lab figures out RSI first and zooms past the biggies.

  • undefined 9 hours ago ago
    [deleted]
  • cootsnuck 7 hours ago ago

    I can't wait until the RSI fad dies down for awhile and we can get a break from all the intellectual grandstanding...

    The code they released doesn't match what's in the paper.

    And the results they got are significantly narrower than the narrative heft being asked for by their word choice ("To advance beyond humanity’s accumulated knowledge", "AI’s Odyssean moment").

    I'm tired boss.

    • NitpickLawyer 2 hours ago ago

      > RSI fad dies down

      Don't fall for the "marketing hype" antihype. RSI is a trendy term today, and lots of people discuss it, but it's nothing new. We've basically had forms of RSI since the start of the LLM craze. Previous models have been used to improve next versions for ~3 years now. Just because humans used to guide / select / decide when and how to apply those models, doesn't make it less recursive or self or improvement. We're now seeing what happens when we remove the humans from some of the tasks, but the basics are still there. Use prev model to make next model better.

    • zby 5 hours ago ago

      This is not a fad - this is a consequence of the Bitter Lesson. RSI is the only game in town now.

      • imtringued 4 minutes ago ago

        RSI is also known under more mundane words such as "Learning".

      • suopspaces 4 hours ago ago

        I don't get it. TBL is an observation, not a law or guarantee. It says (Compute / $) is increasing. In efficiency terms:

        useful_work / $ = (useful_work / compute) × (compute / $)

        But the left side only improves if the method can turn that extra computation into useful output.

        • zby 2 hours ago ago

          RSI is about turning that extra computation into acceleration - that is applying the compute to the (useful_work / compute) factor - this is the recursive part.

        • singularity2001 4 hours ago ago

          It says much more than that. It says that all custom architectures and approaches are become irrelevant if compute increases, which was proven again by the large latent models recently solving RL tasks better than any classical RL technique.

    • augment_me 5 hours ago ago

      If they had something of value, as a research neolab, they would not just release it but build it into their systems and use it.

      Most of these agentic swarm systems are memory and context managers/compressors. However it's clear from both the paper and the blog that everything is just natural-language-based and generated, effectively making it slop from start to finish.

      Instead of describing how or what was stored by each agent, and how, in what format, how it was selected, the whole process is described as Claude-generated workflows and pipelines, which brings 0 value.

  • foreverhtob 4 hours ago ago

    [flagged]

  • undefined 11 hours ago ago
    [deleted]
  • mrkn1 11 hours ago ago

    [dead]

  • franzcoughka 11 hours ago ago

    [dead]

  • codethief 11 hours ago ago

    Sounds like we're still on track for https://ai-2027.com, for better or for worse.

    • reissbaker 9 hours ago ago

      Everything starting from mid-2026 is incredibly wrong, which is pretty poor predictive performance considering they published it mid-2025. List of misses:

      - In mid-2026, China will be six months behind the released models of the American labs. (In mid-2026, China released Kimi K3, which was equivalent to the best released U.S. model at the time, Claude Fable.)

      - In mid-2026, China will nationalize all domestic AI labs and centralize them into a new special economic zone, the "CDZ," created around a nuclear reactor. 80% of all chips in China will be redirected to the CDZ. This uh. Obviously didn't happen.

      - In late 2026 OpenAI/Anthropic will release a tiny model that outperforms their previously-best 2026 model (Astra/Fable), that is priced 10x cheaper, and they will market fine-tuning for it. (Lol.)

      - AI will increase the stock market by late 2026 by 30% (in fact the S&P 500 is up 13.9% YTD, which is pretty good, but not at all out of the ordinary).

      Their predictions for 2027 also seem pretty wrong: e.g. they expect continual learning to be solved in January, and RSI including from a research perspective, not just "optimize CUDA kernels," to also be solved in January, which I suspect no serious lab employee believes anymore. Most lab employees believe RSI will happen (as do I!), of course, but not in two and a half months.

      By early 2027 they expect cyberwar with China because China has stolen the weights of a model and smuggled it into the CDZ.

      By mid-2027 they expect true superintelligence, where essentially all engineers and researchers are useless, unable to comprehend the advances the AI is able to make and largely unable to even usefully manage or steer AI, who are better at self-managing than a human would be.

      Considering their 2025-mid-2026 predictions were basically "progress continues as normal and nothing crazy happens," it's not super surprising that they were more or less right about that. Their 2026/2027 predictions were the spicy ones, and none of them have happened, or are even on track to happening!

      • Philpax 7 hours ago ago

        Agree with most of this, but:

        > In mid-2026, China released Kimi K3, which was equivalent to the best released U.S. model at the time, Claude Fable.

        I don't think this was, or is, true: https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/artificial-analysi... - even from a vibe check alone, it was pretty clear that K3 was missing Fable's special sauce, especially for more hands-on problems.

        The Chinese model lag depends on who you ask, but the current estimate seems to be about four months: https://stateofopensource.ai/

        > In late 2026 OpenAI/Anthropic will release a tiny model that outperforms their previously-best 2026 model (Astra/Fable), that is priced 10x cheaper

        We don't know the sizes of any of these, but GPT Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 are tremendously competitive for their cost, and in some ways beat their larger-sized predecessors. I'd say there's enough doubt that I'd be willing to provide partial points to this claim. (No finetuning, yes.)

        • throwawayy6767 2 hours ago ago

          >I don't think this was, or is, true: https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/artificial-analysi... - even from a vibe check alone, it was pretty clear that K3 was missing Fable's special sauce, especially for more hands-on problems

          What special sauce exactly? Refusing to work on any problems remotely connected to biology (including e.g. the book of Genesis)?

          >The Chinese model lag depends on who you ask, but the current estimate seems to be about four months: https://stateofopensource.ai/

          Benchmaxxing aside, most actual performance is now harness and orchestration dependent and the difference between frontier US and Chinese models is dim as best for virtually all practical tasks. The vast majority of people don't need to solve Navier-Stokes

        • reissbaker 7 hours ago ago

          The prediction was a 10x price reduction, so equivocating about "we don't know the size" doesn't save their prediction — a 10x price reduction would imply the model was likely more than 10x smaller in parameter count, and the price factored heavily in their prediction (they predicted its low cost would destroy other competition, since no one else could have such a capable model at that low price). And Haiku/Luna are nowhere near competitive with Astra or Fable, which doubly damns their prediction. I'm surprised you would pooh pooh the equivalence of K3 and original-Fable (which has been widely shown across many different benchmarks and even human preference data), while claiming an equivalence between Haiku and Fable!

          • arshxyz 4 hours ago ago

            If you stretch the definition of "previously-best 2026 model" a bit, Haiku 5.5 outperforms Opus 4.6 which was their best at some point in 2026 while being 10x cheaper.

      • sznio 6 hours ago ago

        >In late 2026 OpenAI/Anthropic will release a tiny model that outperforms their previously-best 2026 model (Astra/Fable), that is priced 10x cheaper, and they will market fine-tuning for it. (Lol.)

        Opus 5.5 might not be 10x cheaper but it finally made me not hit the limits constantly.

      • aprilthird2021 8 hours ago ago

        Wow shocker. Crazy unfounded prediction website that lots of people said was bupkis at the time turned out to be wrong

    • throwawayy6767 11 hours ago ago

      Are we reading the same website? The predictions for China are completely fantastical - they are not falling behind and if anything the gap is narrowing, and they aren't stealing the weights because they don't need to (distilling is enough). Also the CDZ stuff is just fanfiction at this point.

      • thorum 10 hours ago ago

        Distillation only lets you keep pace with released models. By all indication, OpenAI/Anthropic’s unreleased internal models are so far ahead of Astra/Fable and every other lab that the chance of anyone else catching up is rapidly closing.

        • cmiles74 9 hours ago ago

          I suspect this is more marketing than fact. I don't think there's any real evidence that this is the case, just hints dropped by OpenAI and Anthropic.

          • senordevnyc 8 hours ago ago

            Well, except the giant dump of math problems they just solved with an internal model.

            • CoolestBeans 6 hours ago ago

              That's more a function of the amount of compute they can throw at it. They can afford to let an agent run in a loop for longer than you and I can. Its not proof of a vastly superior model.

            • rdedev 8 hours ago ago

              We don't have any information other than that they are capable enough of solving unsolved math problems. Are they good at writing a good movie script? Do they understand protein ligand interactions? Who knows. Let's wait till they release the model

        • throwawayy6767 10 hours ago ago

          Do you have any source for any of that? Also haven't people been saying that China would be hopelessly distanced for the better part of 2 years, only to be proven wrong over and over again? Deepseek-r1, kimi k3, etc.

          • asa123 6 hours ago ago

            it is quite widely known that the chinese models are just quite shit for math. i think for coding tasks they really do quite alright.

          • sejje 9 hours ago ago

            I've seen the same sentiments/reports, from X accounts known to talk to leakers.

            • throwawayy6767 2 hours ago ago

              People said the same about mythos, and o3, and gpt-4.

              Most of the very recent spectacular achievements (math conjectures) were done by leveraging datacenter capacity (throwing agents and millions' worth of compute at the wall until something sticks), not any secret sauce intelligence.

      • easterncalculus 10 hours ago ago

        No matter what happens, people just blindly claim this nonsense is still accurate. We could have AI halt tomorrow and people on Hacker News would still claim AI 2027 is on track.

        • zamalek 10 hours ago ago

          Five years past the flare

          a bottle drifts with its note

          AI singularity next year

        • someothherguyy 4 hours ago ago

          i thought it was meant as more of a thought experiment than a prediction?

    • maxglute 3 hours ago ago

      If one believes Zitron / Microsoft claims that like ~50% of AI chips bought are in warehouses, and current projected DC delays... the TLDR is the amount of compute lead (aka what drives lead) is fraction of projection, which will shift timelines accordingly. And really if DC build out delays is due to infra or scrubbed altogether, we're talking about years.

    • solenoid0937 11 hours ago ago

      Probably a bit ahead of it.

      • 2001zhaozhao 9 hours ago ago

        Yeah I think we are slightly ahead of the prediction on coding capabilities right now. AI 2027 predicts Superhuman Coder in March 2027 but I think my expectation for it is 1-2 months earlier right now

    • AnodicElegy 8 hours ago ago

      Did you read it to the end? It is insane speculative fiction. They are not even qualitatively right about one of the main narrative planks, which is that by now (mid-late 2026) there would be one clearly dominant company each in the U.S. and China, and that the latter would be nationalizing their compute.

    • Aboutplants 11 hours ago ago

      Pretty amazingly accurate

    • howunfortunate 8 hours ago ago

      Damn this is terrifying, I kinda wish I hadn't read this

    • AndrewKemendo 8 hours ago ago

      I’m still putting it at 2029 for real-world work acceleration.

    • 2001zhaozhao 10 hours ago ago

      Yep we're basically inventing all of the RSI loops that AI 2027 thought we'd invent lol.