Schmidhuber fires back at OpenAI: concrete RSI algorithms have existed for nearly 4 decades

examachine · x · 2026-09-07

• OpenAI researcher Kenneth Liu released data on models accelerating internal research, arguing recursive self-improvement (RSI) could be the biggest contributor to AI capabilities in coming years but will by default stay inside a few frontier labs, urging peers to be equally transparent.
• Jürgen Schmidhuber pushed back hard: RSI is nothing new — concrete algorithms date back to his 1987 diploma thesis, spanning self-modifying policies (1994), asymptotically optimal OOPS (2002), and the Gödel Machine (2003).
• He notes LLM in-context learning and test-time training are special cases of metalearning, computing is now cheap, and RSI startups are emerging.

Related event: Schmidhuber rebuts OpenAI: recursive self-improvement algorithms have existed for nearly 40 years(2 posts)→

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