AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement

New episode with John Schulman, Beren Millidge and Charlie O’Neill. I got together with some of the most insightful AI researchers I know who are at the openish companies, because I wanted to hear the details of what's actually happening at the frontier and what comes next.

Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) – Steelmanning the case against RSI

(00:18:39) – What’s driving the Chinese labs’ progress

(00:28:06) – How will automated AI researchers be trained

(00:33:51) – Will long-horizon RL elicit AGI?

(00:45:24) – The sim-to-real gap

(01:00:33) – How much progress is explained by data?

(01:18:03) – Why is RL working so well?

(01:24:54) – Move 37 and entropy collapse

(01:28:32) – Rapid-fire timelines

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