AI recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all (August 2026)

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The AI industry’s boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight. LLMs can already write code, generate synthetic data for training, and optimize the computer chips they run on.

Opening excerpt

But a new study suggests that it might take a while for us to get there. The researchers behind it found that AI agents are not yet capable of conducting open-ended AI research—free-form investigations that have no clear-cut answers and require judgment and taste, which may be integral to building self-improving AI.

A multi-institution group of researchers, led by Peter Kirgis and Sayash Kapoor at Princeton University, found that AI agents could solve the engineering problems necessary to do AI research but lacked the judgment and creativity to produce original research at the caliber of papers accepted by a top machine-learning conference. The gap suggests that some of the hyped-up timelines for automating AI research may be running ahead of the evidence.

Most existing research on how agents can automate AI research evaluates their ability to complete narrow tasks with checkable answers, such as solving engineering problems or post-training small language models against a benchmark.

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)

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