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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

#691

Post by overgard »

nielsbot wrote: post #406
TheRoque wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So with LLM outputting average code, and people using LLM more and more, I guess the average code will become worse over time ?

Not advocating for AI code slop--but if AI coded software works correctly, maybe it doesn't matter? Except sometimes when a specialist will have to get involved. Not a perfect analogy, but most people don't write assembly these days--they have a compiler do that. Assembly still has a place, but it's a specialist task.

Well, if tokens = cost, and verbosity = more tokens, then smaller code is a financial (and human!) win. Although I'm worried vibe coders are just going to have LLMs modify minified code in caveman mode so they can have 100 agents in a swarm..

On a more serious note, I wonder if this might eventually encourage people to use languages that are a little harder to write but much more concise (functional languages for instance). When you're paying per-token enterprise bean java style verbosity totally sucks

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

#692

Post by overgard »

marcyb5st wrote: post #599
asdfman123 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Maybe we can use software engineers as batteries

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

#694

Post by timacles »

ahtihn wrote: post #654
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the future a few thousand billionaire geniuses will own a world of unimaginable luxury and near-infinite longevity. They will make the decisions, AI will execute them, and robots will do the physical work. Everyone else will be reduced to compost. It's the perfect plan. The final definitive justification for capitalism. The masses are unnecessary. The masses will be optimised. What could possibly go wrong?

Why do billionaires keep working, keep amassing more money, donate to politicians, buy media companies? They want influence and power. Being at the top of a hierarchy of millions, billions of people. If there are no massess the 1000th billionaire will be a the bottom of the hierarchy instead of near the top. They don't want that. The masses are needed to give them the sense of power. What these people want is power a…

I don’t think that’s it. I think the only thing that motivates billionaire is just to have more than the next guy.

The only thing that motivates Bezos is that Elon Musk’s has more and conversely Elon Musk would have a existential crisis if he was no longer number one

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

#695

Post by jpadkins »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #635
ezconnect wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the Capitalist crowd, YES it is the biggest cost. The next is energy. Imagine a world where your research and development is all AI and the production is all automated by robots. Instant product to sell to the masses who has no money because no one is working.

In the future a few thousand billionaire geniuses will own a world of unimaginable luxury and near-infinite longevity. They will make the decisions, AI will execute them, and robots will do the physical work. Everyone else will be reduced to compost. It's the perfect plan. The final definitive justification for capitalism. The masses are unnecessary. The masses will be optimised. What could possibly go wrong?

why only a few thousand? serious question.

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

#696

Post by streb-lo »

ivraatiems wrote: post #466

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…

Disarmament failed though? Global zero initiatives for nuclear weapons stalled out exactly because the risk of someone else cheating is too great. If everyone gets rid of their nuclear weapons and then someone cheats and creates them in secret they can use their nuclear weapons to prevent anyone else from catching up.

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

#697

Post by socalgal2 »

defrost wrote: post #597
socalgal2 wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...…

> there was no complete working device until after the Nazi's surrendered

Isn't an argument. If the Nazi has gotten it first they'd have used it and likely won. Others would have surrendered in the face of the overwhelming power.

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

#698

Post by toephu2 »

pizlonator wrote: post #270
toephu2 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have iterm2 open right now with Claude in a long session and it's only using 500MB of memory.

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

Followup: I closed out Claude completely, iterm2 completely. Reopened iterm2, and it appears iterm2 is using about 500MB of memory. So this has nothing to do with Claude Code CLI.

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

#699

Post by snowwrestler »

sothatsit wrote: post #591
jameson wrote: post #535

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.

If they actually have concerns they can communicate them directly and privately. There are less than 10 companies, in only 2 countries, with advanced enough AI programs to qualify for this type of concern. And Anthropic has the phone numbers for all of them.

Companies do tons of communication and work directly, without press releases or blog posts. If a statement is released publicly, it is done for a PR purpose.

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

#700

Post by snowwrestler »

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…

I don’t understand how lines of code matter at all for scary LLM core capabilities. Does the transformer architecture get better with more lines of code?

My impression was that LLM training codebases were 99% resource management and only a few lines actually implement the core training algorithm, which is where 100% of the intelligence comes from. Data, not lines of code, are the constraint.

After training you can adapt the intelligence in various ways, and that takes a bunch of lines of coded too. But you cant raise the intelligence ceiling again without another training run. So where is the scary recursive part?

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