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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

#371

Post by robbrown451 »

cyanydeez wrote: post #265
robbrown451 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what I am looking at with chatjimmy.... what is special about it? Speed? I'm also not sure what you mean by "we aren't there yet." Where? Sorry, not trying to be difficult or dense, I'm just not sure what you are referring to. > mostly because most of the focus is on exploding the context and parameters. Large context allows a surprising amount of "learning" to happen at inference time rather than traini…

image a streamlined model whose only job is to build then execute the harness at the speed youre seeing in chat jimmy.

Speed isn't really a big deal for me. I want good quality code. It's already able to generate code 10-100X as fast as I could code it myself.

Anyway, are you speaking of the harness? The harness on mine isn't AI, so speed just isn't an issue.

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

#372

Post by wild_egg »

brazukadev wrote: post #355
drtz wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm looking through rose colored glasses, but software that writes itself seems like a pretty big breakthrough to me.

Which is funny because people have been using LISP for that since 1960.

Which is what makes putting an LLM inside a lisp so much fun

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

#373

Post by emp17344 »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #208
Quekid5 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed... why is Anthropic even employing people at all if this AI magic story is true?

You still need wizards to cast the spells..

Not if you’re claiming that the spells, once cast, automatically get exponentially spellier until they awaken into a spell god, capable of literally anything, including casting more complicated spells than any wizard is capable of. If that were true, you’d have no need for wizards. The fact that wizards are still around means it’s probably bullshit.

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

#374

Post by sothatsit »

pizlonator wrote: post #282

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…

Maybe my bar for what constitutes a breakthrough is lower than other people's, but all of these seem like breakthroughs to me:

NLP as a field saw huge shifts. NLP tasks that used to be complex and inaccurate can now be setup very easily and quickly using structured outputs from LLMs, often with greater accuracy.

A small charity I help with has now been able to build their own website to manage their day-to-day operations. It saves them a lot of time, and it was vibe-coded using Manus. I don't think people appreciate how much room there is left for bespoke software to have big impacts on small organisations that can't afford to hire developers. The cost for software like the one they made has gone from 10s of thousands of dollars to $10/month and volunteer hours.

My brother has recently been setting up Cowork to do an automatic review of contracts before human review, and he said it is far more diligent than people when it comes to routine things to check. This is another huge breakthrough for not just efficiency, but the quality of work.

I really don't think we can discount AI finding bugs and vulnerabilities. If you care about code quality and keep up review standard, LLMs can help you write more robust software. AI has found a huge number of bugs for me before they hit production, including potential out-of-bounds memory accesses and segfaults.

ChatGPT has 1 billion MAU. People are now getting life advice, financial advice, and mental health help from chatbots at a scale and cost that no human support network could match.

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

#375

Post by AussieWog93 »

pizlonator wrote: post #297
drtz wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm looking through rose colored glasses, but software that writes itself seems like a pretty big breakthrough to me.

That goes straight to my point: then why hasn’t the miracle of automated coding led to breakthroughs outside of automated coding? If the only breakthrough is automated coding with no outside consequence then it’s just masturbation

N=1, but Claude etc. have made a huge difference to my life personally.

Built a bunch of software tools to streamline my small ecommerce business - while also running it - and things have turned around from "losing money and ready to pull the plug" to "looking at our best financial year on record" in the span of about 8 months.

I could imagine it wouldn't make a huge difference to the life of someone deeply entrenched in a traditional tech role, trying to get an extra 9 of reliability in a service or roll out a new carefully planned and QA'd feature.

But for tech-adjacent people, it gives us something "good enough", instantly, and basically for free.

That doesn't include the other things I've got it to do (gave Claude SSH access and got it to successfully debug a hang on my Ubuntu server, chucked Codex in a folder full of financial data and got it to find every piece of misclassified payroll transaction data)

Genuinely the biggest breakthrough for "casual" tech users since Excel.

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

#376

Post by megous »

javcasas wrote: post #188
airstrike wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might explain it, in the opposite way it was meant to: https://fxtwitter.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427 > Most people's mental model of Claude Code is that "it's just a TUI" but it should really be closer to "a small game engine".

> For each frame our pipeline constructs a scene graph with React then > -> layouts elements > -> rasterizes them to a 2d screen > -> diffs that against the previous screen > -> finally uses the diff to generate ANSI sequences to draw Yup. Overengineering.

React part maybe. The rest is what any TUI that's using ncurses would do. :)

It really bothers me that most of the TUI harnesses are using 100% CPU quite a lot just printing stuff to terminal. Seems ridiculous.

I guess it comes from syntax highlighting/formatting, which is probably not done incrementally, but over the entire so far displayed block of output, recomputed from the beginning for each new streamed in character. Can't imagine anything else causing the rendering to gradually grind to halt when eg. thinking block is open in opnecode and updates get palpably slow as it grows.

Terminal output itself is fast and consumes almost nothing. You can have 60fps terminal apps that update content every frame and that consume almost no CPU time.

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

#377

Post by grogers »

comex wrote: post #304
replwoacause wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the hell does it need to be so complex? People have been making TUIs for decades. Did we need a small game engine to run claude code?

It doesn’t need to be that complex, but it can be that complex without being slow. Claude Code’s interface is extremely simple. It has tons and tons of headroom to tack on performance overhead without it being noticeable at all. You just have to not do dumb things like redraw the entire UI every time a spinner spins.

It may not be slow, but this crazy complexity is probably a hint at why it can't even scroll up without jumping to the beginning of time.

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

#380

Post by 4ffss »

pizlonator wrote: post #313
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Massive productivity gains.

Yeah. To play devils advocate, computers didn’t translate to massive productivity gains until long after businesses adopted them. There was that quote from ’87: "you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics" Maybe we’re seeing something like that right now with AI? Who knows man

Efficiency and productivity in relation to final goods measured in GDP aren't the same thing.

Its yet to be determined just how 'efficient' people are with LLM's as its not really a one-person thing - the true measure is based on an entire collection of people's output.

Startups being rapidly efficient doesn't mean much in relation to the overall economy.

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