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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

#421

Post by ffwd »

I just want to add that the "recursive" part of recursive self improvement is by no means a given, even if an AI can improve itself.

Recursive self improvement is by its nature a step wise behavior not a continuous one, I would argue. Why? Because you can imagine an AI improve itself by simply fixing random bugs and fixing things using techniques that are in its training, and doing refactoring and so on, all without any real change in capability.

These are not recursive improvements. Recursive improvements usually need conceptual breakthroughs. It is possible to get conceptual breakthroughs with LLMs I believe, maybe it can improve something by tying together ideas from disparate disciplines for example, but I have at least for time being, limited success getting that to work in a way that is creatively new and surprising. Not sure how to get it to feel as creative as the best humans can be.

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

#422

Post by ChrisLTD »

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

Yeah. Bonkers considering the brain of the application isn’t even on your device.

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

#423

Post by fc417fc802 »

qwery wrote: post #240
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".

~ "it's not a TUI! and my dad works at Nintendo" curses, bud. curses. It's genuinely difficult to tell how much of this is true. The post is obviously 100% posturing, but some of the words describe things that could be done. Very few game engines do anything I'd describe as rasterisation. That's kind of the point of a GPU. Well, it used to be. I suppose "small game engines" might be more likely on average to include…

Your broader point is well taken but I thought I'd stop by with some trivia. High end engines such as unreal will rasterize absurd quantities of micro-geometry manually using compute shaders in order to avoid the bottleneck of the hardware rasterizer.

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

#424

Post by bombcar »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #375
pizlonator wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 entrenche…

The joke used to be “be nice or I’ll replace you with a small shell script” - Claude lets you actually get those scripts written which often aren’t replacing anyone but are automating away part of the daily hassles.

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

#425

Post by fc417fc802 »

fluoridation wrote: post #245
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I’m wondering what ‘rasterizing’ literally means in this case. I imagine it’s just creating a 2D map of elements at a very low (probably character) resolution, then diffing that against the last generated map to come up with an optimal ANSI sequence to send to the terminal, would that be right? Seems like a cool puzzle to solve. I wonder what the engineering and organisation tradeoffs were that lead to it — does i…

"Rasterizing" means just one thing in this context: to transform a data structure into an array of pixels. It seems absurd to do this, given that the next step must be to convert back from pixels to text data, but maybe they have some way to generate predictable sequences of pixels (e.g. the character "t" is always rendered as the same pattern of pixels), such that they're cheap to convert back. If they're doing anyt…

Yes, the much more plausible explanation is that the word rasterize was misused there. They are generating and diffing text data which has been a standard approach to drawing a TUI since the dawn of computing. It is not even remotely resource intensive.

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

#426

Post by windexh8er »

aleqs wrote: post #40

Okay, so anthropic has amazing AI which supposedly writes most of their code and can continuously improve... meanwhile they have outages on a regular basis, and any kind of long-running work will now consistently hit 'API Error: Server is temporarily limiting requests'. Not sure of this is intentional to force a reduction of token usage, but at this point I need to build around these throttling limits and outages wit…

Opus 4.8's critical assessment of Anthropic's "When AI builds itself" [0][1]. Because, why not?

[0] https://pastebin.com/Vc5Yq9Ai [1] https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme...

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

#427

Post by sfink »

mweidner wrote: post #119

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…

This was pretty directly addressed in the article: not doing it would only mean they'd fall behind whoever would. This is not peace time in the AI race.

Whether you agree with that argument is another question.

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

#428

Post by raptor99 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #404
sutterd wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am doing a solo project that is pretty big, meaning it is not something I could vibe code. I can do alot with AI that I could never do on my own, but I am not seeing several mulitples improvement in my productivity. I spend so much time doing what I call "AI wrangling", trying to get it to do what I want. Claude is writing all the javscript and python code, but ultimately I am programming in English. What is good i…

I measured an ~8x increase in the number of commits I've been pushing, and I've actually been trying to restrain myself. I could do a lot more if I stopped reviewing and editing the code. I think it's got more to do with my executive ability than raw productivity though. AI essentially cured my ADHD by making the execution of my ideas virtually painless.

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

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

#429

Post by solid_fuel »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #299
f311a wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infrastructure is a much harder problem. They can't even improve Claude Code, which eats 1GB+ of RAM. Meanwhile, my editor only consumes 80MB of RAM.

The purpose of RAM is to be used.

> The purpose of RAM is to be used.

For useful things, by the computer's owner. It's not there to be used just because Anthropic can't be bothered to give a shit about the quality of their product.

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

#430

Post by sega_sai »

Seeing the words "recursive self-improvement" I was expecting something else from the article. E.g. how the transformer architecture or agent design is being changed/improved through LLM automation, but the article mostly talks about the LOC counts.
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