YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Sergey Brin says Google's AI models are reaching recursive self-improvement

25 points ryan_j_naughton 1 day ago 26 comments

ares623 1 day ago | parent

Oh I'm surprised to learn that their engineers and scientists had 0% usage of their tools before!

sicktriple 1 day ago | parent

guy who sells AI says AI is cool

leecommamichael 1 day ago | parent

ok

avree 1 day ago | parent

Does Sergey still work in the day to day at Google? I thought he mostly stepped back after that affair he had with the product marketing woman for the Google Glass project.

solyin 1 day ago | parent

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-cofounder-sergey-brin-...

He's back, and working 60 hour weeks, since 2023, according to this report.

kennywinker 1 day ago | parent

I simply cannot imagine being a centibillionaire and working 10 hours a week, much less 60.

pllbnk 1 day ago | parent

"Working" is a generous word for his position. The "work" involves flying with private jet to expensive places regular people have never stepped foot in for noncommittal meanings, showing up around the office at random times, have a word with random high-level managers in the office. All the while not having the slightest thought about someone evaluating your performance or output.

gregglain 1 day ago | parent

Performance review 2025: yes

Refresher: a few lambos annual raise, small town as a bonus, larger town in RSUs

cedws 1 day ago | parent

Also the part where you have three meals a day prepared for you, children’s needs taken care of, laundry washed ironed and folded, house cleaned. Working “hard” as a billionaire doesn’t mean shit.

poulpy123 1 day ago | parent

I would do it for the money but it's not a life I would choose if I was already rich

radford-neal 1 day ago | parent

A "centibillionaire" has 10 million in assets.

I think you meant "hectobillionaire".

kennywinker 1 day ago | parent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_centibillionaires

> A centibillionaire (prefix: centi- from Latin centum 'hundred' and billionaire)[2] is an individual whose net worth is at least 100 billion units of a given currency, typically USD.

I agree it's weird - I would also have expected it to mean 1/100 of a billion, like a centimeter means 1/100th of a meter. I assume it's a term made up by an american or british person.

radford-neal 4 hours ago | parent

Being in wikipedia doesn't make it right. At most it means that several people have made the same mistake.

seanhunter 1 day ago | parent

Maybe they will recursively self-improve to the point where they are genuinely competitive with Anthropic and OpenAI, or where they “AI summaries” they add to search results aren’t total garbage most of the time.

chaostheory 1 day ago | parent

If Argon was impressive, I would maybe believe it. Right now, argon is not even close to Opus 5.5 or even 6.1 Sol. It can’t even infer intent as well as Gemini 3.1 Pro. Google has yet to release a frontier class model imo

smashers1114 1 day ago | parent

I disagree somewhat. I think internally OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are probably all pretty close right now. Argon is competitive with Opus 5.5 and Astra. It might be third, but its competitive at least. Its becoming more apparent that different models are RL'd for different tasks.

Astra (or broadly openAI) are best for mathematics, 3D modeling, and vision. Opus 5.5 is best at like visual design (or just in general adding more taste and feel)

Now, it can depend on your definition of frontier class model. But Argon is a strong model. Google is not running a distant third. If OpenAI and Anthropic shut down they would have the strongest model on the market in like 2 months imo. Google does suck at shipping (maybe due to an unusual amount of dogfooding models internally?)

And we know all the labs have stronger internal models than their public releases.

treebeard901 1 day ago | parent

It's not guaranteed that a next token prediction machine is capable of recursive self improvement. Or will be able to create AGI in any form.

StevenWaterman 1 day ago | parent

That's why it's news

kennywinker 1 day ago | parent

It’s also not guaranteed that owners are reliable narrators, when speaking about how great their business is doing. In other breaking news, worlds best cup of coffee found in truckstop diner!

kennywinker 1 day ago | parent

Does this not just mean they’re using LLMs to prep training data for the next LLM to be trained on? Because it sounds like that, reading between the lines of hype, i mean.

lazide 1 day ago | parent

it just feeds into the ouroboros issue, however, as it lacks reliable independent feedback.

kind of like grading your own tests in school.

if you’re really honest, hey maybe. and it’s certainly faster for the teacher!

brazukadev 1 day ago | parent

it is probably about coding its own harness and being able to assess it to improve.

pbiggar 1 day ago | parent

Reminder Sergey Brin was in the Epstein files.

ZeroGravitas 1 day ago | parent

And his wife was RFK's running mate and main funder when he ran for President on a platform of vaccines causing autism.

vrganj 1 day ago | parent

Snake Oil vendor says his oil cures cancer.

amai 1 day ago | parent

Google is doing Google things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlTNN0gvkLM