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

anthropic.com

511–520 of 738 posts

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

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So in your opinion AIsnd LLMs aren’t improving? They can’t do it today, therefore they never will?

Certainly has never been times in the recent past when people have confidently predicted computers could never do something that computers were then able to do shortly after the prediction was made.

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

#512

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…

What would qualify as a breakthrough for you?

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

#513

This is the lowest quality discussion I've seen on HN in ages.

I use the disparaging nature of the comments on HN as an indicator of AI progress. It’s negatively correlated. By that metric, AI has improved significantly this year alone.

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

#514
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The messed up scrolling behavior I keep getting in Claude Code is definitely due to their code.

There is a setting that fixes this, I can't remember what it's called off the top of my head

CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1

This is a beta feature where Claude code draws the interface on the terminal’s alternate screen buffer like vim or htop. I believe it’s not the default because there are some potential compatibility issues deepening on your terminal setup. I’ve found it to be a nice improvement. It also fixed the issue where copy-pasting selected text from the terminal creates unwanted line breaks.

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

#515

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.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL "I measured an 8x increase in the number of commits Ive been pushing" is an absolutely useless statement

Subscribed to Claude a few months ago. I immediately started working with it on my programming language. Since then, I've implemented a compacting garbage collector, a size class based memory allocator, a unified value heap, deeply optimized hash tables and even implemented shapes like V8 and Self, redesigned the value representation, created a Common Lisp style condition system, implemented UTF-8 text decoding, refi…

I’m sure rapor99 is unimpressed while not being able to point to any similar accomplishments in their own work in the same timeframe.

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

#517

I fail to see how pursuing recursive self-improvement at full speed is compatible with Anthropic's stated goal of AI Safety. If nukes were not invented yet, would it really be a good idea to build and sell them as fast as possible (in peace time, no less)? I am not cynical enough to believe that Anthropic's warnings are pure marketing hype. Let's hope that it is instead overconfidence or the result of too much time t…

> Anthropic's *stated goal* of AI Safety

Actions speak louder than words. If you want to understand someone, simply watch what they do. What they say is irrelevant.

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

#518

> AI that can build itself would be a major development in the history of technology—one that could bring enormous good for the world I really can't stand these guys anymore...

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

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

#519
post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the thing that worries me is that an LLM can be guided to agree with any premise and will rarely ever take a hard stance.

…which is why it’s led to more than zero suicides.

There are many known cases of it saving lives.

Also, they have done a good job shutting down the psychotic behavior you could get from 4o era models. If there are remaining issues like that they ought to fix them too.

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

#520
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

What would qualify as a breakthrough for you?
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