Researchers at OpenAI say it. Researchers at Anthropic say it. And so, increasingly, do researchers at Google DeepMind. They’re putting more and more of their AI development in the hands of AI itself, and the cycle is speeding up.
Twitter’s premier AI rumor-broker, Andrew Curran, said yesterday that “rumors have been circulating for three days” that training of DeepMind’s next model is going faster than planned because of new discoveries. What new discoveries? “There are rumors of training improvements with machine assist.” What’s the most “optimistic” rumor? “That they have successfully closed the loop and have achieved RSI.”
This would be... a huge deal, and not just because it would likely put DeepMind back in frontier contention with Anthropic and OpenAI. If DeepMind — or any lab — has truly started a cycle of recursive self-improvement, then we’ve reached the part of the story where the AI labs lose control on purpose and surrender our fate to AIs cooked up by other AIs.
If true RSI has been achieved, it is more important than any of the current excitement about company proposals for pacing development.
I don’t know if this has happened! Curran’s track record is strong — he most recently claimed that Navier-Stokes had been solved days before the math story broke — but that doesn’t mean the people he’s talking to aren’t mistaken or confused.
My point is that we’re likely in the end-game, or close enough to it that every day and hour really matters. AI capabilities are ticking up every day we spend letting the labs discuss among themselves how they’d like to exercise more responsibility in a way that “does not mean halting model training or technical progress.” They’re ticking up every hour OpenAI dodges transparency about its swarm incidents, and every minute we spend shooting down bad AI takes online.
We can’t wait for the next Congressional session, the next President, or the next warning shot to start regulating this industry, because right now the government probably doesn’t even have enough visibility into the labs to know how close to the edge they’ve taken us. The most momentous and dangerous development in history shouldn’t be the kind of thing our leaders learn about through a series of unsubstantiated tweets.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.