Recursive self-improvement through collective intelligence

(pub.sakana.ai)

72 points | by hardmaru 4 hours ago

12 comments

  • status_quo69 1 hour 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 51 minutes 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.

  • codethief 2 hours ago
    Sounds like we're still on track for https://ai-2027.com, for better or for worse.
    • reissbaker 17 minutes 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!

    • throwawayy6767 2 hours 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.
        • throwawayy6767 1 hour 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.
          • sejje 1 hour ago
            I've seen the same sentiments/reports, from X accounts known to talk to leakers.
      • easterncalculus 2 hours 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 2 hours ago
          Five years past the flare

          a bottle drifts with its note

          AI singularity next year

    • howunfortunate 2 minutes ago
      Damn this is terrifying, I kinda wish I hadn't read this
    • AndrewKemendo 0 minutes ago
      I’m still putting it at 2029 for real-world work acceleration.
    • AnodicElegy 4 minutes 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 2 hours ago
      Pretty amazingly accurate
    • solenoid0937 2 hours ago
      Probably a bit ahead of it.
      • 2001zhaozhao 58 minutes 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
    • 2001zhaozhao 1 hour ago
      Yep we're basically inventing all of the RSI loops that AI 2027 thought we'd invent lol.
  • mochacosine1206 27 minutes ago
    Wouldn’t it be funny if some other lab figures out RSI first and zooms past the biggies.
  • 2001zhaozhao 1 hour 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.
  • jsemrau 2 hours 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 1 hour 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.
      • jsemrau 1 hour 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.
  • dpweb 2 hours ago
    The discovery of some information theoretic limit to model learning (at least using current paradigms) can't come soon enough.
    • AndrewKemendo 2 minutes ago
      What problem would that solve?
    • thatsabadlook 1 hour 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
    • optimalsolver 2 hours ago
      Only Claude (Shannon) can save us now.
      • nutjob2 1 hour ago
        He's spinning in his grave, but below the Nyquist limit
        • whacked_new 38 minutes ago
          Best comment in <duration>*

          * dependent on velocity

  • woah 3 hours ago
    This sounds incredibly expensive
    • sva_ 2 hours ago
      It's just a 27b model finetuned with LoRA?
      • chrisweekly 32 minutes ago
        that's a statement (as a rebuttal), not a question, right?
        • sva_ 20 minutes 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
  • throwyonion 2 hours 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 2 hours 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 2 hours 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)
  • mrkn1 2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • franzcoughka 2 hours ago
    [dead]