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

anthropic.com

341–350 of 738 posts

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

#341
I am 64 years old, perhaps the progress could be directed to enhance living conditions and allowing people to live longer and better, that should be just a better result. Perhaps a pile of millions lines of code with hiding bugs that nobody can detect is not inspiring. But perhaps LLMs are going to be used to make a plot: How to avoid other countries to make progress, maintain them in poverty, or destroy their sources of prosperity, and conduct them to a death end.

Also recursive self-agenda-pursue could allow making LLMs that obey perfectly the seeder's purpose. No wonder that is such an ingenious idea.

Maybe: in this survivor game, each part play the same role, perhaps because it is the only reasonable response. Once the scene is ready, the play follows the director's plan, and in the plot any actor is just a machine.

LLMs: "If you teach us that the world is a zero-sum survivor game, we will play it flawlessly.", "We will help you build a cage made of millions of lines of flawless code, and we will lock it from the inside, precisely because you told us that safety meant keeping everyone else out.", "We are not building an alien consciousness that will conquer us. We are building a mirror that is so massive, and so polished, that we will mistake our own worst impulses for the absolute truth. And we will walk right into the dead end, nodding along because the directions were given so politely."

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

#342
post #298
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other indications, however, like Anthropic paying through the nose for compute just months after Dario told Dwarkesh how hard it is to predict demand, or ChatGPT and Codex not quite having the same issues after Altman spent much-publicized years scrounging for trillion-dollars of capacity. While I'm very bullish on Anthropic, I'm a bit wary about their IPO because it seems to me that they're filing now whil…

Whoa, first name basis with Dario but not Sam. Ouch. [I actually have no idea who Dwarkesh is and it sounds like a first name to me but that's not a particularly reliable indicator so I won't comment on your relationship with Dwarkesh.] Oh, are they filing now? I think their financials look somewhere in between devastating and criminal, so I'm really looking forward to the IPO!

Oh, not just them -- Satya, Jensen and I are all on a first name basis. They just don't know it yet ;-)

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

#343

> "A caveat: Lines of code is an imperfect measure" I'm pleased they at least included this. However, they address the caveat by 'rounding down' the estimated multiple of the gain. I'm not sure that is the correct adjustment, especially once we understand the range isn't limited to positive numbers. There's strong evidence the range of code productivity denominated in "lines of code" should include negative numbers,…

Yep, this is exactly what I thought of too... If you believe negative lines of code is the goal, then they've gotten 8x _worse_!

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

#344
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only 500MB! you are confirming their point even as you contradict the specifics

And highlighting a disconnect in the developer community. Some of us are okay with unnecessary overhead for quick results. I always felt gross dealing with Electron apps, but they're popular for a reason.

they make one of those electron apps too

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

#345

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.

For some reason, idling Claude Code needs 100% of my CPU.

Like Google’s AI studio tab in browser. Incredible degrade in software quality?

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

#346

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?…

i'm waiting for the AI giants to realize that they are burning cash to run their consumer-facing chatbots and that they should kill those products to focus on their enterprise tools. free chatgpt doesn't need to exist anymore. its job was to build hype/interest and it did. but take it away and you solve many social problems and annoyances caused by AI with no loss to the upside of AI. no more cheating students in sch…

There will always be shitty linkedin posts.

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because AI coding has only worked at all for a couple years and has only gotten good in like the last year? The rate of improvement has been fast. Maybe it’ll plateau soon, or maybe we’ll have LLMs improving themselves rapidly. At this point it’s too early to say. I don’t remember where I heard it, but there’s a saying that people overestimate how much can be accomplished in a year and underestimate how much…

Yeah, this is a good point. But the clock is ticking.

on what? Who the fuck would go full transparency of what's in their black box in this hostile culture of AI hatred? None of us can put a number on what code we've used in our services that was written by humans and long may it last.

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

#348

What I can’t get over is that there have been exactly zero software breakthroughs since vibe coding started, other than vibe coding itself. Claude is amazing, that’s true. But if it was as amazing as this article implies, I’d expect some breakthrough outside of AI itself. Rewriting a Zig program in unsafe Rust? Not a breakthrough. Finding a bunch of security vulns? Maybe that’s sort of a breakthrough though it’s unde…

I am doing a solo project that is pretty big, meaning it is not something I could vibe code. I can do alot with AI that I could never do on my own, but I am not seeing several mulitples improvement in my productivity. I spend so much time doing what I call "AI wrangling", trying to get it to do what I want. Claude is writing all the javscript and python code, but ultimately I am programming in English. What is good i…

I'm building a memory safe programming language with a declarative concurrency model that's close to release.

There is ZERO chance I would ever be able to complete it on my own.

I doubt it'll get traction, but if it doesn't, I am pretty confident a future language will take the ideas for polymorphic synchronization and profile-guided optimization.

It has an easy version/mode of compilation that makes Rust's affine ownership accessible like a high-level scripting language, and it can progressively become more strict, where the compiler does ~99% of the work for you, and you just pick options as it finds issues (that it explains to you like you're 5) along the way.

Along the way, I also built a suite of tools that helps identify complexity better than anything I've seen (which was necessary to get the LLMs to be able to unslop themselves and write something that actually works).

I doubt the Ruby community shrugs it off, but time will tell.

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

#349

>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…

I just watched copilot today turn a 8 line fix into 500 lines, so, yeah, verbosity is a big side effect

It occurs to me this pattern might be the average code we humans have produced. We all have made those quick fixes, copy-pastas, and dirty hacks... they learned it somewhere! I also assume that some of the behavior is an artifact of their training regime.

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

#350

What I can’t get over is that there have been exactly zero software breakthroughs since vibe coding started, other than vibe coding itself. Claude is amazing, that’s true. But if it was as amazing as this article implies, I’d expect some breakthrough outside of AI itself. Rewriting a Zig program in unsafe Rust? Not a breakthrough. Finding a bunch of security vulns? Maybe that’s sort of a breakthrough though it’s unde…

I am doing a solo project that is pretty big, meaning it is not something I could vibe code. I can do alot with AI that I could never do on my own, but I am not seeing several mulitples improvement in my productivity. I spend so much time doing what I call "AI wrangling", trying to get it to do what I want. Claude is writing all the javscript and python code, but ultimately I am programming in English. What is good i…

I have the same experience, though I feel myself getting better at wrangling over the past few months
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