AIDE² Self-Improvement Run Beats 2 Years of Manual Tuning
WecoAI’s AIDE² experiment was widely circulated as a concrete test of recursive self-improvement. The setup reportedly let an “autoresearch” system keep researching and rewriting the autoresearch agent itself; after running for 8 days, it outperformed a harness the team had manually tuned for 2 years on a held-out benchmark. The result matters because it moves self-improvement from abstract discussion to a measurable agent experiment, but interpretations quickly split.
How the experiment was described
According to @latticecut’s summary, AIDE² used a two-loop structure: an inner agent handled research tasks, while an outer agent rewrote the inner agent’s code framework or harness based on observed performance. Each rewrite was tested, and only better-performing versions were kept. The system reportedly went through about 100 iterations.
Some reposts framed AIDE² and GoalOS as work at the “agent operating system” level rather than a narrow optimization of a single agent. In that description, the target of improvement can include jobs, tools, validators, memory, and goals, alongside the core agent workflow.
Reactions and limits of the claim
@EchoOfOppenheimer described the result as the first experimental evidence for recursive self-improvement. But @GaryMarcus, while reposting discussion of the paper, emphasized that the gains from each self-improvement round appeared to diminish, with a fitted growth relationship of about [Intelligence]^0.075; in his reading, that is far from the linear or superlinear pattern often invoked in fast-takeoff scenarios.
A repost from @KordingLab made a similar cautionary point: even if the experiment supports some form of recursive self-improvement, that does not by itself justify stronger claims about an imminent singularity.
2026-07-15 ~ 2026-07-16 · 12 related posts
- Episode 1: Lilian Weng and Sakana AI Explore Harness Engineering for RSI(2026-07-07, 4 posts)
- Episode 2: AI Recursive Self-Improvement Concept Faces Heavy Skepticism(2026-07-11, 3 posts)
- Episode 3: Lilian Weng's Deep Dive into Recursive Self-Improvement via Harness(2026-07-13, 9 posts)
- Episode 4: AIDE² Self-Improvement Run Beats 2 Years of Manual Tuning(2026-07-15, 12 posts)
- Progress Reported in Self-Improving Agent Experiment — ChengleiSi · 2026-07-15
- AIDE² Outperforms Hand-Tuned Version — PMinervini · 2026-07-15
- AIDE2 Demonstrates Recursive Self-Improvement — TinfoilTricorn · 2026-07-15
- First Experimental Evidence of RSI — EchoOfOppenheimer · 2026-07-15
- Agent Recursive Self-Improvement Experiment — markjeffrey · 2026-07-15
- RSI Paper: No Fast Takeoff in Sight — GaryMarcus · 2026-07-15
- [source] AI Agents Demonstrate Recursive Self-Improvement in Experiment — latticecut · 2026-07-15
- Agentic OS and Self-Improvement Experiments — Ghost_Pilot_MD · 2026-07-15
- Experimental Evidence of RSI: Self-Improving Research Agents — JensHonack · 2026-07-16
- GoalOS Demonstrates 3rd-Gen Recursive Self-Improvement — Ghost_Pilot_MD · 2026-07-16
- Weco AI Demonstrates Recursive Self-Improvement — blaizedsouza · 2026-07-16
- RSI Experiment Sparks Singularity Debate — KordingLab · 2026-07-16