Import AI 455: AI systems are about to start building themselves.

The first step towards recursive self improvement

Harness Engineering for Self-Improvement

The concept of recursive self-improvement (RSI) dates back to I. J. Good (1965), where he defined an “ultraintelligent machine” as a system that can surpass humans in all intellectual activities and design better machines to improve itself. Yudkowsky (2008) used the phrase “recursive self-improvement” for a specific feedback loop: an AI uses its current intelligence to improve the cognitive machinery that produces its intelligence. This feedback loop in modern AI may indicate the model rewriting its own weights directly, or more broadly the model improves the training pipeline and the deployment system, which in turn enables a better successor model with improved performance across economically valuable tasks. The speed of research development in AI has been shown to drastically accelerated in frontier labs (Anthropic; OpenAI).

When AI builds itself

Our progress toward recursive self-improvement, and its implications.

AI Simulation Platform for Human Behavior | Simile

Simulate how real customers respond to a launch, price change, or campaign — before you ship. Built by the Stanford researchers behind generative agents.

Jenny Zhang on Twitter / X

Introducing Hyperagents: an AI system that not only improves at solving tasks, but also improves how it improves itself.The Darwin Gödel Machine (DGM) demonstrated that open-ended self-improvement is possible by iteratively generating and evaluating improved agents, yet it… pic.twitter.com/YJPFTJ51SO— Jenny Zhang (@jennyzhangzt) March 23, 2026

Peter Wildeford🇺🇸🚀 on Twitter / X

Great to see @tristanharris talking on his podcast about recursive self-improvement. Here's how his guest, Tim Fist, puts it -- "Over the last few months we've had all three of the leading US AI labs say that having the option for a global slowdown or pause in AI development is… https://t.co/s5UURtkEjQ— Peter Wildeford🇺🇸🚀 (@peterwildeford) June 21, 2026

pguso/ai-agents-from-scratch

Demystify AI agents by building them yourself. Local LLMs, no black boxes, real understanding of function calling, memory, and ReAct patterns.

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Discover what actually works in AI. Join millions of builders, researchers, and labs evaluating agents, models, and frontier technology through crowdsourced benchmarks, competitions, and hackathons.

Meet Foundry: An AI Startup that Builds, Evaluates, and Improves AI Agents

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