From I.J. Good's intelligence explosion to Schmidhuber's Gödel Machine, Sakana AI's Darwin Gödel Machine, its crimson successor, and the labs racing to close the loop. Introduction: The Loop That Changes Everything Recursive self-improvement (RSI) is the idea that an AI system could improve the process by which it improves itself — a feedback loop where each generation of the system gets better at building the next. It's the mechanism at the heart of most "intelligence explos

Everyone is building the next big model. Almost nobody is building the next intelligence. There's a foolish, unspoken consensus in AI right now: if human-level AGI is coming, it'll come from frontier labs training bigger LLMs and wrapping them in better harnesses. That assumption is short-sighted — and almost certainly wrong. LLMs are powerful tools. They are components of AGI systems, and scaffolding for building them. But they cannot be the core of human-level intelligence.