Has AI entered the RSI era
OpenAI and Anthropic are both running unreleased models capable of speeding up their own research, and the researchers closest to the work disagree on whether that counts as recursive self-improvement.
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Zvi Mowshowitz says OpenAI and Anthropic have both entered a recursive self-improvement era — but researchers closest to the work aren't convinced
Zvi's September 13 post flagged an unreleased OpenAI model that grew 'more capable than Astra across the board' within two weeks of training, calling that pace more alarming than the Navier-Stokes proof it produced. Two days earlier, John Schulman, Beren Millidge and Charlie O'Neill told Dwarkesh Patel they see diminishing returns and persistent bottlenecks in AI defining its own objectives, not a takeoff. Zvi · Dwarkesh Patel
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WATCHOpenAI's Noam Brown debates recursive self-improvement on Dwarkesh's podcast
In a Sept 17 episode, Brown discussed agent swarms, models tackling Navier-Stokes-adjacent math, and what it would take to verify alignment before any genuine recursive self-improvement — without claiming today's systems have crossed that line. Dwarkesh Patel
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Practitioners disagree on how close recursive self-improvement actually is
Nathan Lambert argued Sept 19 that real recursive self-improvement remains distant — scaled-agent progress is 'lossy self-improvement,' limited by narrow automatable research and diminishing returns from parallel agents — and called extinction-risk alarm 'very religious.' OpenAI's Noam Brown, on Dwarkesh Patel's Sept 17 podcast, said his team still doesn't know how to verify alignment before anything resembling RSI, without claiming today's systems have crossed that line. Predictions, not findings — and they don't agree. Lambert · Dwarkesh / Noam Brown
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Nathan Lambert debated RSI pacing and the US-China capability gap with Epoch AI's JS Denain, Sept 22. Nathan Lambert