Recursion ($RXRX) podcast mentions
Is this what they call recursive self-improvement?
Steven Bartlett · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17Is that also why recursive self-improvement was central to your argument? Because at some point, if it starts improving itself, then it's kind of like a runaway train of intelligence.
Steven Bartlett · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17As I've tried to understand the alignment argument and the extinction risk argument, a couple of things keep popping out to me. Number one, it seems to rely on thresholds. Once we hit recursive self-improvement, once we hit AGI, Then it's game over for us. I don't love those threshold arguments. They're fairly poorly defined and there's a huge assumption on the other side of them. We hit this point and then all of humanity goes away. That is a gigantic claim.
Andrew McAfee · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17It's worse if they understood how the system works, then recursive self-improvement becomes much easier. You get faster takeoff. Right now, the model doesn't understand its own thinking.
Roman Yampolskiy · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17If they start recursive self-improvement process this year, 2027 looks as reasonable as any other year.
Roman Yampolskiy · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17This is contingent on recursive self-improvement.
Ed Zitron · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17So the self-improvement— This would definitely be expedited by recursive self-improvement. But so far, humans have been doing great. They got to human-level AI with just—
Roman Yampolskiy · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17But there's a difference between large language models and recursive self-improvement though. And there is quite a gap.
Ed Zitron · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17I think the claim is that if you get recursive self-improvement, it could happen soon. Right.
Nate Soares · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17Well, no, but Agent Zero needs to get, or I remember AI 2027 had recursive self-improvement happening already. Like it was like a, it's very specific that it's like, and then it starts teaching itself without that link. AI 2027 kind of falls apart. I agree. We need to, I genuinely agree with you that we need to do something about this. We need to have economic, we need to have actual regulatory things. But I think the fact like engaging with AI 2027, for example, gets away from actually fixing the problem. It gets people talking about a thing in the future when you can talk about what are we going to do today and why are we doing it?
Ed Zitron · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17So they have nailed those predictions better than me. I think we cannot rule out this scenario. I think we can't rule it in. I think you may be right that we hit a wall. You may be right that there's some fundamental thing missing, like that one of their steps in AI 2027 just steps too far. I hope and pray that's true, but I don't think we can rule out this happening in 2027, given what we have seen. I think we cannot rule out that you take the stuff that we have, you project it forward 3 months, and you put an agent swarm 10,000 strong on making a better AI architecture, and it succeeds. For all I know, recursive self-improvement could begin in It doesn't have to be a lot better.
Nate Soares · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17One of the reasons why, you know, when all these Frontier Labs CEOs like Dario and and they will start talking about this stuff. In terms of incentive structure, I think that if their teams know and they're not out publicly talking about it, then their teams will quit. So one of the reasons why I think you have this strange culture in tech we've never seen before where team members are tweeting and the CEO is tweeting about the dangers is because as the guy we mentioned at the start, Jacob Coxon, yeah, he talks about what's going on in their Slack channels. He talks about in their Slack channels, They're talking about the potential catastrophe. So I think that Dario, in order to retain his team members, needs to be out front saying, by the way, we're getting closer to recursive self-improvement, which is what he's been doing. And I think Sam has to also publicly say the big danger. So people often say, oh, they're saying that for this reason and that. I think if they don't say that publicly, they don't retain their employees. For example, in my company, we have 200 people. If internally we were discussing a real risk, and I, that had a threat to human humanity.
Steven Bartlett · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17So the labs are increasingly, like the conversation I had with Sam last October, they're aggressively expanding compute. Why? All the things you heard yesterday, we're heading into recursive cycles. They're seeing incredible demand for the product, and so they're building out compute. This year, the total amount of compute added. So 2026, about 19 gigawatts, and about 7 of those gigawatts went to the 2 leading labs. Next year, this is Semi Analysis, so Dylan Patel forecast that the work— that we're going to add 43 gigawatts and that about 14 gigawatts are going to go to the leading labs. And we'll come back to this question of can we really stand up 43 gigawatts of compute next year? Notice that the amount that we're adding next year is as much as the total compute we have in the United States this year. The cumulative compute we have in the United States this year. So that's what the market is anticipating.
Brad Gerstner · All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · Brad Gerstner: No AI Bubble, Semis Eat the Nasdaq & AI's Take Off Problem · 2026-09-17Here's the thing. One of the last lines, committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely. Meta has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well. Look, like there's absolutely zero shot that Zak walks into MSL and like gathers the researchers and says, look, I don't want to make models that make our models better. I don't want to do it. I want you guys just focus. There's zero, zero chance. So again, like this to me is just like he is being disingenuous with his positioning of almost every single point here.
Jordi Hays · TBPN · METR and AI Regulation, Zuck Pushes Back on AI Slowdown, Fed Hikes Rates | Diet TBPN · 2026-09-16Here's the thing. One of the last lines, committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely. Meta has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well. Look, like you, there's absolutely zero shot that Zuck walks into MSL and like gathers the researchers and says, look, I don't want to make models that make our models better. I don't want to do it. I want you guys just focus like that. There's zero, zero chance. So again, like this to me is just like he is being disingenuous. With his positioning of almost every single point here.
Jordi Hays · TBPN · Third Party Evaluators, Fed Hikes Rates, Zuck Pushes Back On AI Slowdown | Jeremy Allaire, Tomasz Tunguz, William Layden, Justin Beroz, Eli Wachs, Sean McCarthy, Tom Mueller · 2026-09-16