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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

#21

I cannot wait for these models to tear down traditional social hierarchies. We havent even begun to see the effects, fingers crossed

Hierarchies exist for a reason, take away the reason and the house of cards eventually collapses — but the house of cards is still a house. When it’s gone, we’re back to laws of the jungle.

Be careful what you wish for IOW.

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

#22

> We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research—in collaboration with many others—and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require. Interesting - they're commiting…

I read this differently: they are actually seeing that it's hard to keep advancing frontier models, and now are moving the goal posts so that when they start getting evaluated more harshly, they can point to something like this.

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

#23

Sorry but if AI can build itself then it can run companies of size 3000 companies with a few people. Or even higher. What are the consequences?

As has been mentioned in the sibling comment it already is.

Consequences are: financial crisis.

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

#24

> We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research—in collaboration with many others—and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require. Interesting - they're commiting…

Theyre probably looking to get a way to slow down the capex required to keep up, so they can be more profitable

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

#25
the tooling has quite a ways to go to catch up to the llm engines that drive the real value. I have encountered various codex bugs (I know not anthropic) which tell me that.. these billion dollar companies, if they are eating their own dog food, can still release buggy crap software.

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

#26
> If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing

Even Anthropic wants to Pause AI now. There must really be not much time left for "edging". Please write to your lawmakers, no matter whether you are in the US, Europe, China, or elsewhere. Only an international agreement between governments can enforce an AI-Pause and eliminate the necessity to dangerously push the frontier.

https://pauseai.info/

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

#27

> 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 syst…

Until the moment we start bragging about how many lines of code LLMs are saving us, we're walking in the wrong direction. Your programs, designs and architectures is supposed to get better, not add even more boilerplate just because you can produce it faster...

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

#28

> We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research—in collaboration with many others—and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require. Interesting - they're commiting…

We should be skeptical of any major player that advocates for regulating their own industry. In practice, this just means increasing barriers to entry and making it harder to compete with them. In my mind we should be trying to push AI along the Linux trajectory. You have a free and open source product, developed by a decentralized team with a strong code of ethics, running on commodity hardware. There can still be t…

Wouldn’t this align with their financial interests? In theory the thing that’s keeping them from being profitable (or one of the big things) is the periodic capex expenditures of building new frontier models.

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

#29
post #21

I cannot wait for these models to tear down traditional social hierarchies. We havent even begun to see the effects, fingers crossed

Hierarchies exist for a reason, take away the reason and the house of cards eventually collapses — but the house of cards is still a house. When it’s gone, we’re back to laws of the jungle. Be careful what you wish for IOW.

I think certain types of people with power, i.e. access to capital, will lose relevance. world will become more meritcratic with ai as leverage to the individual
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