Schmidhuber Claims Priority: First Concrete RSI Algorithm Dates to 1987
On September 17, Jürgen Schmidhuber posted a series of messages alongside technical note "Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) Since 1987" (IDSIA-9-26), systematically reviewing his roughly four decades of RSI research and explicitly claiming he published the first concrete recursive self-improvement algorithm back in 1987. The priority claim draws attention as RSI becomes an industry buzzword.
Confirmed
- Schmidhuber released technical note IDSIA-9-26 summarizing his RSI work since 1987, including early efforts from 1994 onward such as self-modifying policies.
- He stated that when he published the 1987 work, compute was roughly 100 million times more expensive than today (another post says on the order of a million times).
- He distinguished I. J. Good's 1965/1966 informal "intelligence explosion" conjecture—which offered no concrete algorithm—from his own 1987 thesis work applying genetic programming to itself, recursively evolving better GP methods with multiple meta-levels, which he calls the first concrete RSI algorithm.
- He listed the follow-up lineage: gradient-descent-based RSI in neural networks from 1992, and 1993 work solving the neural-network self-reference problem.
- A user researching RSI with ChatGPT found it identified Schmidhuber's 1993 work as the first true self-modifying, self-improving algorithm, calling him AI's most brilliant yet most cursed researcher; Schmidhuber personally reshared the discussion.
- He noted The New York Times recently covered RSI, involving his former PhD student Louis Kirsch and Kirsch's new company Inherent Labs.
- He argued RSI now drives both software AI and physical AI, and stressed in a long report discussion that self-improvement must not remain software-only: real AI requires physical machines and robots—no mastery of the physical world, no ASI.
Why it matters
- RSI is among the hottest directions in AI today, tied directly to superintelligence debates; Schmidhuber's historical account supplies an early academic lineage.
- Louis Kirsch's Inherent Labs signals the shift from academia to commercialization, with NYT coverage marking mainstream visibility.
- His stance that hardware beyond software self-improvement is required extends the RSI narrative into robotics and physical AI, echoing the embodied-AI boom.
- Known for asserting historical priority, Schmidhuber's concentrated posting reads as a claim over the concept's provenance—offering a first-hand (though partly self-serving) view of the field's genealogy.
2026-09-17 ~ 2026-09-18 · 10 related posts
- Episode 1: Schmidhuber traces 40 years of recursive self-improvement and debunks Google RSI claims(2026-09-13, 2 posts)
- Episode 2: Schmidhuber Claims Priority: First Concrete RSI Algorithm Dates to 1987(2026-09-17, 10 posts)
- Episode 3: Schmidhuber Reasserts He Pioneered Recursive Self-Improvement in 1987(2026-09-19, 4 posts)
- Episode 4: Schmidhuber: I Was Doing Recursive Self-Improvement Back in 1987(2026-09-22, 3 posts)
- Episode 5: Schmidhuber claims recursive self-improvement dates back to his 1987 work(2026-10-09, 2 posts)
Primary sources
- Schmidhuber: I published the first concrete RSI algorithms in 1987, now RSI is driving AI's future — SchmidhuberAI ·
- Schmidhuber claims first concrete RSI algorithm dates to his 1987 thesis — SchmidhuberAI ·
- NYT covers recursive self-improvement; Schmidhuber's ex-student founds Inherent Labs — SchmidhuberAI ·
- [source] Schmidhuber: I published the first concrete RSI algorithms in 1987, now RSI is driving AI's future — SchmidhuberAI · 2026-09-17
- Schmidhuber Publishes 40-Year Retrospective on Recursive Self-Improvement Since 1987 — rbhar90 · 2026-09-17
- Schmidhuber plugs paper concretizing I.J. Good's 1966 intelligence explosion via concrete RSI algorithms — SchmidhuberAI · 2026-09-17
- [source] Schmidhuber claims first concrete RSI algorithm dates to his 1987 thesis — SchmidhuberAI · 2026-09-17
- [source] NYT covers recursive self-improvement; Schmidhuber's ex-student founds Inherent Labs — SchmidhuberAI · 2026-09-17
- Schmidhuber: no ASI without self-improving hardware and mastery of the real world — SchmidhuberAI · 2026-09-17
- Schmidhuber confirms he solved neural self-reference back in 1993 — SchmidhuberAI · 2026-09-17
3 near-duplicate retellings: SchmidhuberAI · SchmidhuberAI · SchmidhuberAI