# 1004: Recursive Self-Improvement

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/super-data-science/1004-recursive-self-improvement
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/super-data-science/1004-recursive-self-improvement.md
Podcast: [Super Data Science: ML & AI Podcast with Jon Krohn](https://stenobird.com/podcast/super-data-science)
Published: 2026-06-26T11:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/chrt.fm/track/E581B9/arttrk.com/p/VI4CS/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/SUPERDATASCIENCEPTYLTD7501786741.mp3
Audio file: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/chrt.fm/track/E581B9/arttrk.com/p/VI4CS/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/SUPERDATASCIENCEPTYLTD7501786741.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/super-data-science/episodes/1004-recursive-self-improvement
Duration seconds: 600

## Resource

Could an AI get good enough at AI research to build its own, more capable successor and kick off a compounding loop? That’s recursive self-improvement (RSI) and it surged into the conversation after Anthropic revealed that, as of May 2026, Claude wrote more than 80% of the code merged into its production codebase. In this Five-Minute Friday, Jon Krohn separates today’s AI-assisted coding from true RSI, walks through the accelerating evidence - METR’s shrinking task “time horizon,” Google DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve, Andrej Karpathy’s overnight training-tuner, weighs Jack Clark’s 60% bet that AI builds its own successor by 2028 against the compute, data and “marketing” skeptics. As ever, Jon lands in the optimistic middle. Additional materials:⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.superdatascience.com/1004⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Interested in sponsoring a SuperDataScience Podcast episode? Email natalie@superdatascience.com for sponsorship information.

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/super-data-science/episodes/1004-recursive-self-improvement/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/super-data-science/1004-recursive-self-improvement.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.