Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 738 posts

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

#81

Post by simianwords »

peheje wrote: post #20
nickandbro wrote: post #14

So what happens when the world becomes hyper optimized with closed loop AI agents recursively trying to optimize everything deemed sub optimal?

there will be a lot of paper clips

Often repeated meme doesn’t have any bearing to reality.

The orthogonality thesis sounds like a fun gotcha but if you give it some thought you realise how strange it sounds and the opposite thesis - collinearity thesis is actually correct.

1. Intelligence transfers and compounds

2. Goals of agents are not arbitrary

3. Our goals and agent goals are more likely to be aligned at the deeper level

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

#82

Post by artninja1988 »

vblanco wrote: post #80
reasonableklout wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coordinating a pause at the frontier is not the same as destroying or even harming open source/China. It feels like both open source can flourish while the frontier is deliberately regulated?

they explicitly mention in the article that just frontier stopping isnt enough because then that just means others will catch up, they want to be the leaders of a global organization/cartel that bans everyone except themselves. Particularly important given anthropic attacks china and opensource every chance they get. https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

Yeah. This is why Anthropic is way worse than openai. They don't contribute shit to open source and even lobby against it.

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

#83

Post by josefritzishere »

Aperocky wrote: post #51

Anthropic is the most self hyped company I've seen, to the point that I'm wondering what would happen to its employees if they held a different opinion. Do they just.. keep it to themselves? For instance, if some Anthropic employees had a completely rational opinion that all of this isn't going to lead to AGI, but I just don't hear that ever from them. The metric being tracked, code commits, is hilariously one sided.…

I can't get away from the a similar conclusion. Even AI Pioneer has said that LLMs are at a dead end.

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

#84

Post by thinkingtoilet »

aagha wrote: post #70
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…

And don't forget that they have BILLIONS of dollars and can't figure out how to get a decent support or public communications system setup.

Don't confuse things. It's not "can't figure out", it's "don't care to figure out". They're not dumb. They just don't care about support.

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

#85

Post by fooqux »

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…

Exactly. If AI is going to start being graded on how many LoC it generates- oh, I'm sorry, how much it "accelerates", than guess what newer models will start doing more of?

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

#86

Post by robbrown451 »

Do code harnesses that build themselves count as recursive self improvement, or does it need to be the AI itself to qualify for the term?

I always was fascinated (obsessed?) by robots that build robots, or even things like this that can contribute a lot to making the next version of itself: https://buildyourcnc.com/products/cnc-machine-blacktoe-v4-2x... (cnc router that cuts plywood, and is made out of cnc-router cut plywood)

This is my own effort at an AI assisted coding environment optimized for building itself: https://recursi.dev/ (just launching it, hope its ok to mention it, it is free/open source.... here is the HN link that has gotten no love yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48401022 )

Personally I think harnesses are as important as the AI itself, and have this crazytheory that even if the models stopped improving today we could still have massive advances in the harnesses alone.

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

#87

Post by contagiousflow »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #84
aagha wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And don't forget that they have BILLIONS of dollars and can't figure out how to get a decent support or public communications system setup.

Don't confuse things. It's not "can't figure out", it's "don't care to figure out". They're not dumb. They just don't care about support.

Couldn't they just have background agents "figure it out"

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

#88

Post by f311a »

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…

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.

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

#89

Post by cyanydeez »

robbrown451 wrote: post #86

Do code harnesses that build themselves count as recursive self improvement, or does it need to be the AI itself to qualify for the term? I always was fascinated (obsessed?) by robots that build robots, or even things like this that can contribute a lot to making the next version of itself: https://buildyourcnc.com/products/cnc-machine-blacktoe-v4-2x... (cnc router that cuts plywood, and is made out of cnc-router cut…

If you want to get out ahead of what's coming, it'll be small models that bootstrap the harness rather than anything else.

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

#90

Post by collingreen »

contagiousflow wrote: post #87
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't confuse things. It's not "can't figure out", it's "don't care to figure out". They're not dumb. They just don't care about support.

Couldn't they just have background agents "figure it out"

If agents can just figure it out, isn't that AGI?
Post reply on HN