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

anthropic.com

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

#101

Post by lanthissa »

robbrown451 wrote: post #86

Do code harnesses that build themselves count as recursive self improvement, or does it need to be the AI itself to qualify for the term? I always was fascinated (obsessed?) by robots that build robots, or even things like this that can contribute a lot to making the next version of itself: https://buildyourcnc.com/products/cnc-machine-blacktoe-v4-2x... (cnc router that cuts plywood, and is made out of cnc-router cut…

yes? the future for any verifiable task is the model attempts to verify initial state and a goal then decomposes its tasks in to every smaller verifiable subtasks, with /memory being the persistence between runs and then /dreaming on the results of those memory files + run data to introduce new ideas.

i think thats the path to async agi these labs are imagining. The only limit is that sensor data you have on the world or your system, how long your willing to wait, and how much you're willing to spend to parallelize it.

maybe once you start building out these verified workflows you can feed that back into training and hte model starts to get a feel for the world to the point that it can intuit things since it has these sub paths built.

my personal agi test is can a model, trained on video of someone knocking on a door and then open it encounter a microwave for the first time and open it when the foods done without knocking.

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

#103

Post by andai »

f311a wrote: post #88
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…

Infrastructure is a much harder problem. They can't even improve Claude Code, which eats 1GB+ of RAM. Meanwhile, my editor only consumes 80MB of RAM.

Try 64K! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal

Also remember when XP was super bloated cause it needed 64MB?

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

#104

Post by malfist »

torben-friis wrote: post #36

>A caveat: Lines of code is an imperfect measure, as it measures quantity over quality. So 8× lines of code/engineer/day in the second quarter of 2026 is almost certainly an overstatement of the true productivity gain. Nonetheless, it indicates an acceleration. At Anthropic, we don’t reward people for how many lines of code they write; rather, team members are producing more code simply because they’re using AI syste…

One of my co-workers just asked me to review his pull request that was all AI generated. 600 files were touched, over 40k lines of code added.

I'm sure he thought that was a crowning achievement, proof that AI can enable 10X developers, after all, what engineer could write 40k lines of code in a week?

I declined to review it, stating that I couldn't possibly vet 40k lines of code, and wouldn't put my reputation on the line to stamp the work as good. The PR nagged me for 2 weeks from my todo list and then disappeared. I don't know if he found another dev to get an approval from, or if the PR was abandoned. But I know for sure that him and I are on two totally separate islands around the value of LLMs.

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

#105

Post by 4ffs »

sonink wrote: post #61

Broadly agree to this position - I think there are some people skeptical that Anthropic is doing this for regulatory capture - but I think there are being honest about they are seeing and how regulation should catch up. I for one, believe that we should pause all work on AI for the forseeable future. This is almost impossible to orchestrate - but we should still try nevertheless. Maybe we are not able to pause, but w…

"Even Geoffry Hinton has said the same thing"

The same bozo who claimed radiologists would be out of a job by now.

The data does not support what you nor others say. Jesus christ. Cant believe people are this dumb. Has LLMs infested the minds of people to the extent they can't critically analyse whats happening infront of their eyes?

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

#106

Post by 8note »

sonink wrote: post #61

Broadly agree to this position - I think there are some people skeptical that Anthropic is doing this for regulatory capture - but I think there are being honest about they are seeing and how regulation should catch up. I for one, believe that we should pause all work on AI for the forseeable future. This is almost impossible to orchestrate - but we should still try nevertheless. Maybe we are not able to pause, but w…

no, it really doesnt.

the end of humanity has a strong case for banning all burning of fossil fuels immediately

the end of humanity as a sales tactic to increase your stock price does not

these are companies working on their IPO to make sure they can get the best price, not people being honest about what they think lies ahead.

if they were being honest about what lies ahead, they'd unilaterally stop training, and put all of their money into FPV drone bombs to destroy datacenters being used for training or inference

if you actually believe the thing is gonna kill everyone, you're not gonna worry about how you stop it, and certainly not keep building and operating the thing

that they arent buying anti-tank mines to drop on data centers says they arent in the slightest serious about it

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

#107

Post by malfist »

SimianSci wrote: post #41

Anthropic is looking to IPO here soon. A key aspect of this is to prove profitability. Shifting their focus from Training new models to instead serving inference, they would greatly reduce their spend. In fact this is something being reported on that they are already doing, which is the reason for their first ever profitable quarter. Its awfully convenient that the company which has greatly reduced its spend on train…

I mean, if they've consumed all of human knowledge. What's left for them to train on? This pivot isn't only because it's cheaper and a way to juice the numbers for an IPO, it's survival because they can't improve more.

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

#108

Post by Readerium »

mofeien wrote: post #57
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.

Loll

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

#109

Post by robbrown451 »

andai wrote: post #98
robbrown451 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think that, but ended up going the other direction, partly because I don't have the wherewithall to build a model but then I realized, with existing models that can take more than a tiny amount of context, you can just let any model bootstrap itself with a good prompt sent by the system. There's a ton of other tricks to it, but mostly keeping the protocol simple for the AI so it can concentrate on coding lo…

> mine also makes extensive use of things like abstract syntax tree library to help with surgical edits from the LLM Tell me more! This takes me way back. I did one like this in the GPT-4 days! (8k context window)

Start off with my video!!! You can also try it with zero setup (you can code right there on the static web page, it will save your edits in the browser indexed DB, and hotpatch them back into the code before it runs it.... also you can grant permission to the browser to read/write to a local directory)

recursi.dev

Seriously, I'm looking for collaborators.

There's upwards of 80,000 lines of code in the editor system, a lot to it to make sure that even newbies don't get stuck.... so that's kind of proof the system works since it doesn't break down when the codebase grows large.

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

#110

Post by canadiantim »

cpursley wrote: post #94
chilipepperhott wrote: post #91

I find any and all claims like this ridiculous from a company who can't build a terminal application that uses less than a gigabyte of RAM.

A came here just to write: Pretty please let it churn for a few nights and redo Claude Code in Rust. Because the harness is very very good as are their models, but that node thing is a hog for no good reason at all.

People already rebuilt Claude Code in Rust after the Claude Code leak, it's on github as claw code (and other variants)
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