LLMs are already doing autoresearch, and the gap may widen again

teortaxesTex · x · 2026-07-20

• The post argues that LLMs have already been doing a form of autonomous research for a while, so the idea of “RSI” is not a sudden discontinuity.
• It also echoes a claim that the China–US model gap has not really closed over the past two years, and may widen again.
• The rationale given is that frontier labs were compute-constrained, shifted compute toward RL because returns were higher, and are now in a phase where faster compute growth lets them scale both pretraining and larger RL runs at once.
• The quoted thread adds that much of the apparent gap narrowing may come from delayed public releases, stronger internal models, and benchmark overfitting in China.
• The long-term implication is that model progress could accelerate from here, with a more dramatic gap widening in the next 6–12 months.

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