When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement • Hacker News Board

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#51

Post by Aperocky » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 6:16 PM UTC

Anthropic is the most self hyped company I've seen, to the point that I'm wondering what would happen to its employees if they held a different opinion. Do they just.. keep it to themselves? For instance, if some Anthropic employees had a completely rational opinion that all of this isn't going to lead to AGI, but I just don't hear that ever from them.

The metric being tracked, code commits, is hilariously one sided. Philosophically, if you had one part of your work now practically free, you'd like to utilize that freedom to maximally cover for the other parts, for instance:

Instead of thinking about edge cases with brain and whiteboard, you can have the LLMs to simply generate most possibility including tests for it, because that is cheaper. There's probably 50x more commits of which 40 will be revert pairs but we are only twice as fast. And in reality nothing did change because the outcome remain the same. I can't see how it is necessarily different in the LLM space.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#52

Post by mofeien » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

honeycrispy wrote: post #33

mofeien wrote: post #26

> If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing Even Anthropic wants to Pause AI now. There must really be not much time left for "edging". Please write to your lawmakers, no matter whether you are in the US, Europe, China, or elsewhere. Only an international agreement between gov…

That would be like trying to get every country to agree to give up nukes.

Or agree on finding ways to promote peaceful use of nuclear energy. This has been done, there are thousands of people working on it around the globe and 180+ member states of the IAEA. It's not easy, there have been close calls.

And cooperating interntionally to buy ourselves time to find ways to develop this "last invention" is a way that will do good for humanity seems to be on a similar level.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#53

Post by fasterik » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 6:18 PM UTC

techblueberry wrote: post #28

fasterik wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should be skeptical of any major player that advocates for regulating their own industry. In practice, this just means increasing barriers to entry and making it harder to compete with them. In my mind we should be trying to push AI along the Linux trajectory. You have a free and open source product, developed by a decentralized team with a strong code of ethics, running on commodity hardware. There can still be t…

Wouldn’t this align with their financial interests? In theory the thing that’s keeping them from being profitable (or one of the big things) is the periodic capex expenditures of building new frontier models.

I don't think there's anything inherently bad about Anthropic making a profit. Red Hat makes a profit off of Linux. I'm interested in the democratization of the underlying technology.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#54

Post by wstrange » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 6:18 PM UTC

llmslave wrote: post #37

techblueberry wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tear down or reinforce?

capital/ability to leverage labor is going to lose power

I'm not so sure. It seems those with capital will accumulate it even faster.

Without some kind of income redistribution we are sailing into dark waters.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#55

Post by jakobnissen » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 6:18 PM UTC

aleqs wrote: post #40

Okay, so anthropic has amazing AI which supposedly writes most of their code and can continuously improve... meanwhile they have outages on a regular basis, and any kind of long-running work will now consistently hit 'API Error: Server is temporarily limiting requests'. Not sure of this is intentional to force a reduction of token usage, but at this point I need to build around these throttling limits and outages wit…

Their outages are probably not due to their code though. It’s probably their infrastructure that can’t keep up. So seeing failures of infrastructure doesn’t really tell you anything about how good or bad Anthropic makes use of their models.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#56

Post by baq » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 6:19 PM UTC

damowangcy wrote: post #2

AI tech bro: Month 1 - 6 months to AGI Month 2 - We will Replace all jobs Month 3 - Okay maybe only the SWEs, programming is solved Month 4 - Announce model that is too dangerous to release Month 5 - Releases dangerous model Month 6 - This is it! We will replace AIs with more AIs (*secretly files for IPO) AI is here to stay, like it or not but it is not the solution to everything. If it is, what is Anthropic's moat?…

Anthropic is providing agentic intelligence as a service. OpenAI and Google deepmind also are in this business.

The problem is, if you’re any sort of knowledge worker, you’re essentially providing the same thing: you’re an intelligence with agency.

MCP is irrelevant. The moat is the quality of intelligence the service providers sell, including you. Tokens aren’t fungible between providers until you measure that they are for your use case, that’s kinda sorta the goal of job interviews.

Thus the moat will be that they’re providing the best models for the things people need other intelligent people for, but we should expect there will be limits on how much share they can economically take assuming competitors are optimizing for slightly different targets (but there’s still significant overlap in capability). This will disappear, but it’s always a question of when. The path matters as much as the destination.

Note that implications for you and me are exactly what the article says they are: nobody knows, but it’ll be a dramatic shift.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#57

Post by mofeien » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

nickandbro wrote: post #14

So what happens when the world becomes hyper optimized with closed loop AI agents recursively trying to optimize everything deemed sub optimal?

I would assume that shortly after, the solar system will be hyper optimized as well, then the milky way, then the local cluster, and so on. Everything will be close to optimal afterwords, and I sure hope we will have specified the target function for that optimization correctly in the single attempt that we will have had.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#58

Post by minimaxir » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

I have been doing more experiments with what I have now been calling agentic iterative optimization: telling the LLM to optimize code such that it speeds up all real-world-representative benchmarks by X% without cheating or causing regressions in both tests and performance metrics (e.g. MSE for statistical algorithms or file size in the case of something such as image compression). This is done using Rust where there are more low-level levers to tweak for performance than something like Python.

Opus 4.6/4.7 was consistently successful at getting 2-3x speed improvement with just one pass. It can also do the inverse: improve the performance metrics for better quality without causing a significant regression in speed. Then GPT-5.5 turned out to be much better at this workflow, often getting a multiplicative 1.5x-2x improvement above what Opus could do.

I now have quite a few GPT-5.5-optimized projects in various domains that are feature complete and are substantially more performant than existing SOTA implementations that I plan to open source as soon as possible: the bottleneck is polish as usual.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#59

Post by SimianSci » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

llmslave wrote: post #16

I cannot wait for these models to tear down traditional social hierarchies. We havent even begun to see the effects, fingers crossed

Never heard of a stratified economy? Spoiler alert: none of us will be in the good part.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#60

Post by baq » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC

llmslave wrote: post #29

baq wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hierarchies exist for a reason, take away the reason and the house of cards eventually collapses — but the house of cards is still a house. When it’s gone, we’re back to laws of the jungle. Be careful what you wish for IOW.

I think certain types of people with power, i.e. access to capital, will lose relevance. world will become more meritcratic with ai as leverage to the individual

It’s exactly the opposite I’m afraid. Capital already has more access to AI, both quantitatively (tokens for dollars) and qualitatively (biggest players got Mythos first). Expect this trend to continue.