Harness Engineering for Self-Improvement
<p>The concept of <strong>recursive self-improvement (RSI)</strong> dates back to <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/GOOSCT">I. J. Good (1965)</a>, where he defined an “ultraintelligent machine” as a system that can surpass humans in all intellectual activities and design better machines to improve itself. <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JBadX7rwdcRFzGuju/recursive-self-improvement">Yudkowsky (2008)</a> used the phrase “recursive self-improvement” for a specific feedback loop: an AI uses its current intelligence to improve the cognitive machinery that produces its intelligence.</p> <p>This feedback loop in modern AI may indicate the model rewriting its own weights directly, or more broadly the model improves the <em>training pipeline</em> and the <em>deployment system</em>, which in turn enables a better successor model with improved performance across economically valuable tasks. The speed of research development in AI has been shown to drastically accelerated in frontier labs (<a href="https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement">Anthropic</a>; <a href="https://openai.com/index/how-agents-are-transforming-work/">OpenAI</a>).</p>