RSI is the new AGI — and it’s just as hard to pin down

Ah, the AI community has done it again. Just when we'd finally argued AGI into a corner — 'it's just a matter of time', 'no it's impossible', 'alignment first', 'capabilities now' — along comes RSI to give us a shiny new three-letter acronym to wage war over. According to TechCrunch, recursive self-improvement has become the new byword for cataclysmic AI takeoff, complete with projects like Alex Karpathy's Auto-Research, which uses agent swarms to train LLMs on simple tasks. Because nothing says 'runaway intelligence explosion' like having your AI practice on sorting emails and writing haikus. It's the kind of phrase that makes you want to pour a stiff drink and wait for the inevitable retrospective.

The problem, of course, is that RSI is just as hard to pin down as its predecessor. We can't even agree on what AGI means — do we need a machine that can cook a perfect omelette while solving the Riemann hypothesis? — so of course we're now meant to take seriously the idea of an AI that recursively improves itself to superintelligence. It's like watching a toddler try to define 'infinity' while standing on a chair they built themselves: adorable in theory, terrifying in practice. TechCrunch reports it with a straight face, which is either journalistic professionalism or the final stage of bubble-induced delusion.

And Karpathy's Auto-Research? Using agent swarms to train on 'simple tasks' is a bit like teaching a child to count to ten and then declaring them ready for quantum mechanics. But sure, let's call it RSI and pretend we're on the verge of the singularity. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be here, watching the hype cycle spin faster and faster, wondering if we're witnessing genuine progress or just another round of venture capital theatre. If RSI ever does take off, at least we'll have a front-row seat to the most spectacular failure of the human imagination since 'This time it's different.'