RSI hype sweeps AI: recursive self-improvement or fear-driven business?
创业邦 · wechat · 2026-09-17
As the AI industry churns out buzzwords, "RSI" (Recursive Self-Improvement) has become the latest hot term. This article traces its roots and the business interests behind it.
RSI goes back to I.J. Good's 1965 "intelligence explosion" idea. A recent paper from SJTU, Tsinghua, ByteDance and Shanghai AI Lab defines five autonomy levels (L1-L5), with the top tier being self-improvement of the improvement mechanism itself. OpenAI says it hit its "automated research intern" goal — per human workday invested, research agents now run the equivalent of 3.1 workdays. Anthropic used weaker Claude Sonnet 5 to improve early Opus 4.8's alignment with only 2,400 samples in 60 hours. Lilian Weng, back at OpenAI, leads RSI work via "Harness Engineering." Predictions for ASI range from Schulman's 3-4 years to 5-10, held back by catastrophic forgetting and research judgment.
The article also dissects the safety-narrative business game: Jacob Coxon's resignation post got 170M+ views, followed by rare alignment among OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI on slowing down — which the author argues raises compliance barriers against open-source and smaller players, while the "build strong AI to defend against rogue AI" loop justifies trillion-dollar compute spending. Huang's dismissal of doom narratives protects Nvidia's shovel business. The real fight, the piece concludes, is over how the next wave of compute and capital gets allocated.
Related event: AI circles hype RSI: intelligence explosion or fear-mongering business(2 posts)→
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