Recursive self-improvement only takes off when the improvements are large enough.

We could set an LLM loose on itself now, self-improving its own code, but it's going to only make small improvements, and those will quickly peter out. If you think of it in terms of calculus, the sum of the improvements converges to a finite value, or at least the rate of improvements drop with time.

And even if we build a much better AI capable of performing substantial self-improvement, a burst of such improvement might peter out quickly. Maybe the AI makes fundamental breakthroughs in computing technology once, and then even with its newly improved capabilities, the next breakthrough is smaller, and the one after that is smaller still. Or maybe we hit a period of S-shaped growth, which seems super-exponential at first but then tapers off.

It's wise to be a bit skeptical in our dreams about the future. Yes, society might transform quite radically quite quickly, or on the other hand, maybe the "singularity" isn't even possible. We don't yet know what the scientific limits are.

it's actually the end of the beginning, there's walls that self-improving models hit that are never overcome even when given vast amounts of time.

I don't think anyone has ever tried having a model fully autonomously train a model that is better than it.

Everyone including myself has attempted this relentlessly, it just doesn't work out beyond some arbitrary improvement in specific tested categories instead of broader capability increase.

Did you publish on that topic? Just curious, would love reading more

There's a pretty large paper on the topic: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.15497, but results are somewhat mixed.

My response, which was flagged by automation (I used AI to verify the paper and it says the paper is NOT what you claim it is), was spot on. This paper is not recursive self improvement, it is AI in a feedback loop, but it is not improving itself. It turns your entire premise into something questionable. You said this one done everywhere by many people including you.

Then you present a paper which WAS NOT recursive self improvement so it clearly is not "everywhere".

To be real with you, I don't think you're being entirely honest. You're not presenting a fair argument. You have bias. Recursive self improvement can only be done by frontier labs who created these models in the first place. Academia simply Does not have the funds.

If this is being done, we're not privvy to it. The amount of compute to build these things is astronomical.