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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

#591

I don't quite understand the intent of such article other than to promote themselves given an odd timing that the company is planning on going public, so I can only conclude that this is just part of the IPO roadshow. LLMs certainly have made significant changes to our lives, but I haven't yet to see any extraordinary improvement it brought to me which makes me skeptical about their claims. _if_ it solves many of our…

Or: Anthropic genuinely believes the future scenarios they outline are realistic possibilities, and they want more people to take them seriously.

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

#592
post #573

Whether or not Anthropic is right about what AI can accomplish, whether these performance gains are real or not, their moral stance here is absolutely hideous to me. "We must blast forwards into making this dangerous thing because if we don't, someone else surely will," is a coward's argument. If you believe it is dangerous, you should be dedicating yourself to STOPPING others from making it, not making it first! The…

How do you stop others from making and training a program?

By threatening to nuke their datacenters and chip fabs, for instance.

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

#593

All this singularity trajectory is really interesting. If they manage to build a model that is capable of building the next version of Claude (model and tooling) - wouldn't it be their interest at some point to keep it to themselves? If we ever get to a point where the centaur period is over (when human + AI is not better than just AI) then what competitive advantage ANY human can have other than - the money they alr…

Check out https://ai-2027.com/

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

#595

>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

If you can make it 800 you can claim to be a 100x engineer!

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

#596

I don't quite understand the intent of such article other than to promote themselves given an odd timing that the company is planning on going public, so I can only conclude that this is just part of the IPO roadshow. LLMs certainly have made significant changes to our lives, but I haven't yet to see any extraordinary improvement it brought to me which makes me skeptical about their claims. _if_ it solves many of our…

Or: Anthropic genuinely believes the future scenarios they outline are realistic possibilities, and they want more people to take them seriously.

I find this version unlikely, since companies very rarely genuinely believe what they preach in PR campaigns. It's always some sales and marketting dudes and gals trying to polish up something as something more than it is. Which is very annoying. We can now choose between Anthropic being the one exception to this, while having huuuuge incentive to hype up their product, or we just write it off as more marketting fluff.

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

#597

Whether or not Anthropic is right about what AI can accomplish, whether these performance gains are real or not, their moral stance here is absolutely hideous to me. "We must blast forwards into making this dangerous thing because if we don't, someone else surely will," is a coward's argument. If you believe it is dangerous, you should be dedicating yourself to STOPPING others from making it, not making it first! The…

Good thing the USA didn't listen to you. We'd be under Nazi or USSR thumb if they got the bomb first

Good thing the MAUD Committee didn't listen and repeatedly pushed the US who just wanted to make power with atomic piles and didn't even think it was possible to make a weapon.

Mind you, there was no complete working device until after the Nazi's surrendered, so that's a moot point - and the USSR only had their program because of various Europeans on the US project passing their work (and others) back to the USSR ... making that second claim moot.

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

#599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you think LLMs are the horse (I don't think they are). If they're not, then we should be building a brick wall in front of that door and hiring a full time security guard to watch it. I realize he's saying it for hype, but if the CEO of the company goes around talking about how scared he is of what they're creating, hey, lets just take Dario at his word and put in some strict regulation. He won't mind if they…

Right now the S&P 500 is going wild due to the promise of AI automating everything. Who is the "we" who is going to shut it down? Certainly not the US government. Nor the Chinese government w.r.t. their tech industry. Are you going to start the insurgency? Is there going to be an equivalent one in every developed part of the world?

Yeah, it is crazy to me. Yesterday I did the math how much it would take to fully replace "just" 1M SWEs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48382414 . It turns out you need 380GW of constant power (or 80%+ of US current production). And I conservatively assumed 0.5J / token, which was a number calculated for llama3 8B parameters. Yeah, hardware and models are more efficient now, but I expect SOTA models to be at least 10x that and I don't think there was a 10x in efficiency since llama 3.

All of this to say that the AI hype is not considering the energy portion of the equation enough. It won't automate everything not because it can't but because there is just not enough energy to go around unless there is a 100x or more efficiency gain just around the corner.

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

#600

I don't quite understand the intent of such article other than to promote themselves given an odd timing that the company is planning on going public, so I can only conclude that this is just part of the IPO roadshow. LLMs certainly have made significant changes to our lives, but I haven't yet to see any extraordinary improvement it brought to me which makes me skeptical about their claims. _if_ it solves many of our…

Truly feels like witnessing the worst of capitalism and greed play out. All that compute and energy towards a narrative of reducing the need for skilled programmers. What a waste.

These people don't have our interests in mind and everyone eats it up like a blessing from a god or something. It's surreal.

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