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AI recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all (August 2026)

15 points dgellow 1 hour ago 10 comments

daavidhauser 48 minutes ago | parent

Opus 4.8 plus OpenClaw. I feel like the space is moving so fast that the result with this setup says very little about how close we are actually now.

dgellow 43 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, it’s crazy how fast things have changed in a month. I couldn’t find a more recent replication or similar study but it would be interesting to see it done with the current frontiers. Though I don’t think that would change much about the overall conclusion of the paper

dgellow 41 minutes ago | parent

Link to the actual paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27191

joshheitzman 34 minutes ago | parent

The actual title of the paper is: "Can AI agents conduct open-ended AI research? Early evidence from two case studies"

While I appreciate that the article is throwing a web blanket on doomer claims, the actual study doesn't really get into AI self-improvement. That doesn't require writing papers. That just requires autonomously writing a software system that can produce a better AI agent then the one that created it. That said, I have little worry about this being possible as I have seen no evidence of AI agents being able to produce a working software system of that scale.

marcosdumay 3 minutes ago | parent

Do you think the final product of research is papers?

numpad0 36 minutes ago | parent

Of course it might not, it has been the holy grail of AI research for a long time. It would be great if we could leave some self improving code running on a blank slate of a computer while we sleep and the machine was crying asking me what is everything the next morning. None of AI researchers have had that moment outside of their dreams, so far, but it would be great if it happened.

thorum 25 minutes ago | parent

> The researchers asked Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8, running on open-source software called OpenClaw

Meanwhile, Navier–Stokes was solved by an internal model significantly more capable than Astra (and therefore more capable than Mythos/Fable).

I’m afraid this sort of experiment is cope. The labs clearly believe RSI is coming soon.

whatshisface 14 minutes ago | parent

The method of the NS advance involved RLHE (reinforcement learning via human example), and that is only open-ended if users continue to advance the frontier within chats ahead of publications.

swingboy 22 minutes ago | parent

There’s also the difference between a model recursively improving “itself” and improving itself via online learning.

The former being that these models are helping develop and train future models, but they might not veer too far off in architecture (yet).

The latter is a model being able to train/learn on the fly, in real time, permanently (not just in the current conversation/session), or in other words, adjusting/managing its own weights. But, it also seems like it would take an entire paradigm shift in model architecture from what most LLMs are built on, but I could be wrong.

semiinfinitely 5 minutes ago | parent

this article reads like a joke the "new study" is from group of people that are not at the frontier. they test with $3k of anthropic credits (compare to the >$10M in compute used to solve recent NS last week)