Could an AI get good enough at AI research to build its own, more capable successor and kick off a compounding loop? That’s recursive self-improvement (RSI) and it surged into the conversation after Anthropic revealed that, as of May 2026, Claude wrote more than 80% of the code merged into its production codebase. In this Five-Minute Friday, Jon Krohn separates today’s AI-assisted coding from true RSI, walks through the accelerating evidence - METR’s shrinking task “time horizon,” Google DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve, Andrej Karpathy’s overnight training-tuner, weighs Jack Clark’s 60% bet that AI builds its own successor by 2028 against the compute, data and “marketing” skeptics. As ever, Jon lands in the optimistic middle.<br><br>Additional materials:⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.superdatascience.com/1004⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠<br><br>Interested in sponsoring a SuperDataScience Podcast episode? Email natalie@superdatascience.com for sponsorship information.

1004: Recursive Self-Improvement

Super Data Science: ML & AI Podcast with Jon Krohn

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Super Data Science: ML &amp; AI Podcast with Jon Krohn

## Transcript

This is episode number 1004 on Recursive Self-Improvement. Welcome back to the Super Data Science Podcast. I'm your host, Jon Krohn. Today's topic is Recursive Self-Improvement, or RSI for short. This is the idea that an AI system could get good enough at AI research to build its own more capable successor, which then builds an even better one and so on and so on and so on in a loop that compounds with every turn.

The phrase RSI exploded across the AI world this month after Anthropic published a report on its own internal engineering. The headline number is striking. As of May 2026, more than 80% of the code merged into Anthropic's production code-based was written by Claude, the company's AI model.

They also sponsor this podcast and this episode, but they don't have any editorial input. I decided to do this topic myself and all the research was done independently. So yeah, if you hear Claude ad, it has nothing to do with the substance in this episode.

Anyway, before Claude's coding agent launched in early 2025, instead of the kind of 80% figure that Anthropic is reporting in May of this year, the figure last year was in the low single digits. The typical Anthropic engineer is now shipping roughly 8 times as much code per day as they were 2 years ago, not by working harder, but by directing an AI that does the typing.

In one case this past April, Anthropic said Claude shipped more than 800 fixes that cut a whole class of API errors a thousandfold. Work the engineer overseeing it estimated would have taken a human 4 years. So, is this RSI? Is this recursive self-improvement? Not quite, no. And the distinction matters. What's happening today is AI-assisted coding, where human engineers still set the goals, organize the work, and judge the results.

True RSI would be when the AI manages the whole endeavor, designing the experiments, writing the code, evaluating what worked, and deciding what to try next, with little or no human in the loop. The term itself isn't new. The British mathematician I.J. Goode described an intelligence explosion back in 1965, reasoning that a sufficiently capable machine could redesign itself and rapidly leave human intelligence behind.

The concern was later formalized by AI safety researchers, and the rise of large language models has dragged RSI out of science fiction and into quarterly engineering reports. The evidence that we're inching toward RSI is accumulating. Researchers at the think tank Meter, whom I talk about all the time on this show, have been measuring how long a task an AI agent can complete on its own, defined by how long the same task takes a human professional.

They found that this time horizon had been doubling roughly every seven months for the past six years, but over the past year, it appears to have sped up to something closer to every four months. That is staggering. In practice, Frontier m...

1004: Recursive Self-Improvement

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1004: Recursive Self-Improvement

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.