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robbrown451yesterday at 7:36 PM6 repliesview on HN

Do code harnesses that build themselves count as recursive self improvement, or does it need to be the AI itself to qualify for the term?

I always was fascinated (obsessed?) by robots that build robots, or even things like this that can contribute a lot to making the next version of itself: https://buildyourcnc.com/products/cnc-machine-blacktoe-v4-2x... (cnc router that cuts plywood, and is made out of cnc-router cut plywood)

This is my own effort at an AI assisted coding environment optimized for building itself: https://recursi.dev/ (just launching it, hope its ok to mention it, it is free/open source.... here is the HN link that has gotten no love yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48401022 )

Personally I think harnesses are as important as the AI itself, and have this crazytheory that even if the models stopped improving today we could still have massive advances in the harnesses alone.


Replies

jrfloyesterday at 7:51 PM

I think harnesses would count, AI != LLMs. Any piece of code that helps the computer reason for itself is AI, the harnesses are AI in a sense.

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lanthissayesterday at 7:55 PM

yes? the future for any verifiable task is the model attempts to verify initial state and a goal then decomposes its tasks in to every smaller verifiable subtasks, with /memory being the persistence between runs and then /dreaming on the results of those memory files + run data to introduce new ideas.

i think thats the path to async agi these labs are imagining. The only limit is that sensor data you have on the world or your system, how long your willing to wait, and how much you're willing to spend to parallelize it.

maybe once you start building out these verified workflows you can feed that back into training and hte model starts to get a feel for the world to the point that it can intuit things since it has these sub paths built.

my personal agi test is can a model, trained on video of someone knocking on a door and then open it encounter a microwave for the first time and open it when the foods done without knocking.

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marcosdumayyesterday at 9:58 PM

You need the AI eventually building another AI for the name to apply. This page is just bullshit. They vibe-code their harnesses, and yes, it shows.

Anyway, what does recursive self-improvement even means for neural-network based AIs? It's not clear it's possible at all.

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cyanydeezyesterday at 7:43 PM

If you want to get out ahead of what's coming, it'll be small models that bootstrap the harness rather than anything else.

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reddozenyesterday at 8:43 PM

> Do code harnesses that build themselves count as recursive self improvement, or does it need to be the AI itself to qualify for the term?

Shhh just let the marketing slop wash over you.