What
Rn new LLM models are hand built by expensive researchers.
Each new model costs a fortune, takes months, and people jump ship from these labs all the time (jumping from OpenAI, to Anthropic, to Google, to creating their own labs).
The whole game right now is poach the researchers, experiment with new models for months, manually verify what works, ship the improved model.
Recursive self-improvement (RSI) is when the AI does the researcher's job itself.
It’ll automatically try a change, keeps it if it works, and goes again. Goal is to make good models faster to build and ship. Whoever cracks this first pulls away from other model providers and nobody catches them by hiring.
Disclaimer: I'm an AI researcher at an applied AI company. I use Gemini and am long $GOOG.
Confirmed
Reuters on 13 Aug: Sergey Brin came out of retirement and pointed Google's money at "recursive self-improvement, the point at which the technology can improve without human intervention."
A DeepMind exec told The Information that Google's AI spending is a bet on RSI. Demis Hassabis quit as DeepMind CEO in August to focus full time on AGI.
So Google is confirmed spending a tonne of money on this, I haven’t seen many people react to this.
The leak this weekend
A leaker on X called Lyra says Google has self-improving models running and just pointed them at the big “frontier” Gemini model.
They claim 10 models called rsi-model-liverl-le showed up in Google's internal API, and they’re named with increasing numbers (I’d guess the number of improvement loops it’s gone through).
Lyra has called model leaks before, but treat this as what it is, a leak. There’s nothing publicly available here to confirm and nothing from Google on this yet apart from the comments above section that they’re working on it.
My DD
Look at Google's small model and the speed up in deployment there, Gemini Flash. Shipped in Dec, then May (153 days), July (63), Aug (23), Sep (20).
Twice a year turned into every 3 weeks.
You'd want to test a self-improving system on the small model first because screwing up is cheap.
Meanwhile Google's big model hasn't changed since Feb. The loop ran on the small flash model all summer. The leak says they’re possibly running on the big model.
What this means
Big if they actually have this working, but all that’s confirmed is they’re investing in it and they’ve publicly said nothing else.
Google also haven’t commented on Anthropic/OpenAI’s call to halt model development, so unsure what side they’re on on that topic (which will very much slow down their release timelines).