For the past few days I’ve been testing an impressive open-weight AI coding model called Flint. It suggests that fully recursive self-improvement, or RSI—an exciting and controversial approach that uses AI to build AI—is getting closer.
Flint is the first offering from Recursive, a company that aims to use RSI to advance both AI itself and other areas of science using AI. “Nearly every aspect of the entire model pipeline was actually done and improved upon by AI,” Recursive CEO and cofounder Richard Socher told me.
Socher says his company used its recursive AI system, dubbed the Eureka Machine, to automate most elements of the model’s development. This enabled a company with a handful of researchers to build a world-class model in just a few months, he says.
Socher told me that the Eureka Machine devised a number of innovations, including a new way of training the base model, new model architectures, and code optimized for specific silicon chips. Recursive shared benchmark scores that suggest Flint outperforms other models of similar size and architecture on coding tasks.
AI is already widely used to help build, test, and improve AI thanks to its amazing coding skills. This can speed up the process of refining a model and testing new ideas without the need for as much input from humans.
It is also possible to create a loop through which AI decides what improvements to make and then begins another round of improvement. For the moment this technique is limited, but if AI can contribute to every aspect of model development, then the process could theoretically continue indefinitely.
Some experts worry that letting AI improve itself in this manner could ultimately lead to disaster. These doomsayers claim that AI capable of improving indefinitely could escape human control and might decide that humans are an impediment to its goals.
Those concerns gained wider notice this September when a researcher quit Anthropic and warned that advances in AI, including recursive self-improvement, could lead to human extinction within a few years—a concern then echoed by a number of other experts. The idea of RSI has become so controversial that several bills in Congress propose to ban it.
Recursive sees these fears as more sci-fi than reality and believes legislation to prevent RSI is an unnecessary impediment to progress.
Socher says Flint was built using a system incapable of escaping human control. He says the goal is for the Eureka Machine itself to achieve full recursive self-improvement, but this would still be overseen by humans who could stop the process if it goes awry. “We hope that this shows people that indeed we have all the steps in place” to build such a system, he says.
