{"id":38163,"date":"2026-05-13T23:35:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T23:35:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/38163\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T23:35:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T23:35:17","slug":"notable-researchers-join-4-billion-effort-to-build-self-improving-a-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/38163\/","title":{"rendered":"Notable Researchers Join $4 Billion Effort to Build Self-Improving A.I."},"content":{"rendered":"

Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI released new A.I. systems late last year that were particularly good at writing computer code<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In recent months, the technology has rapidly remade the way that Silicon Valley\u2019s engineers build, test and modify new software applications. If an artificial intelligence system can write code, it can help accelerate the development of things as varied as word processors and social media apps.<\/p>\n

Now, many of the world\u2019s leading researchers believe that A.I. will soon be powerful enough to improve itself with little or no help from human developers.<\/p>\n

\u201cA.I. is code. And now, A.I. can code,\u201d a veteran researcher, Richard Socher, said. \u201cThe ingredients are there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Socher recently founded, with seven other researchers, a company to pursue this mind-bending goal, which is often called \u201crecursive self-improvement.\u201d<\/p>\n

His start-up, Recursive Superintelligence, has raised more than $650 million from venture capital firms including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Greycroft and the chip-making giants Nvidia and AMD. The six-month-old company, which has offices in San Francisco and London, has fewer than 30 employees. But it is now valued at more than $4 billion.<\/p>\n

The company should not be confused with Ricursive Intelligence, which is pursuing a similar goal<\/a> and is also valued at $4 billion. The prominent A.I. start-ups Anthropic and OpenAI are also chasing recursive self-improvement, which has been an obsession among Silicon Valley technologists for decades.<\/p>\n

Dr. Socher, who is also the chief executive of the A.I. start-up You.com, was previously head of A.I. research at the business software maker Salesforce. His seven co-founders include notable researchers from many of the industry\u2019s leading A.I. companies, including Josh Tobin, Jeff Clune and Tim Shi, all from OpenAI, and Yuandong Tian from Meta.<\/p>\n

Many of these researchers specialize in a kind of A.I. development called \u201copen-endedness.\u201d This involves building software systems that can run for days, months or even years in pursuit of goals set by the researchers. <\/p>\n

Recursive Superintelligence has also hired Peter Norvig, who spent 25 years as director of research at Google and co-wrote an A.I. textbook (\u201cArtificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach\u201d) that has been a standard inside universities for three decades.<\/p>\n

Recursion, a term that is common among mathematicians and computer programmers, refers to a mathematical function that feeds itself. After a recursive procedure generates information, it uses that information to generate something else \u2014 and so on.<\/p>\n

Though many researchers are bullish on the idea of A.I.\u2019s recursively improving itself, others point out the current technology is long way from the point where humans can be removed from the loop. Humans \u2014 like Dr. Socher \u2014 must still generate the new ideas<\/a> that drive A.I. development forward.<\/p>\n

The aim, however, is to push more and more work onto machines, including the generation of new ideas.<\/p>\n

OpenAI has said it is now building an \u201cautomated A.I. researcher.\u201d By the fall, the company hopes to have a system that can do the work of a \u201cless experienced\u201d researcher, said Sam Altman, OpenAI\u2019s chief executive. Similar efforts are underway at other leading companies.<\/p>\n

Dr. Socher said his start-up would need years to build the kind of technology that he and his co-founders envisioned. The company hopes to eventually apply the technology to other fields, such as drug discovery and other kinds of biological research.<\/p>\n

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI<\/a> and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit\u2019s claims.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI released new A.I. systems late last year that were particularly good at writing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38164,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[24,25,1555,132,1429,23648,52,23647,23646,1585,139],"class_list":{"0":"post-38163","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-google","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-computers-and-the-internet","11":"tag-google","12":"tag-google-ai","13":"tag-recursive-superintelligence-inc","14":"tag-research","15":"tag-richard","16":"tag-socher","17":"tag-start-ups","18":"tag-venture-capital"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}