Climateer Investing: "Inside the Race to Make AI Build Itself"

From Time magazine, August 7:

Jack Clark, Anthropic’s co-founder, left on paternity leave last November. When he returned in February, he was surprised to learn that colleagues hardly wrote code anymore. They managed five or six copies of the company’s AI, Claude, which sometimes managed several more Claudes.
To Clark, this looked like an early form of something the field has anticipated and feared for decades: recursive self-improvement, or the point at which AI begins to accelerate its own development. First, the thinking goes, models make researchers faster, but as each improvement feeds the next, the models take over more of the research cycle. Years of progress compress into months—leaving society with little time to absorb the consequences, from job disruption to engineered pathogens. Taken to its limit, AI could improve itself without humans, triggering a runaway loop long known as an "intelligence explosion," where machines rapidly advance beyond human understanding, and possibly beyond human control.
Clark believed the world needed to confront this prospect. He posted a flurry of blog posts on recursive self-improvement and flew home to England to deliver a talk on the topic in May, then led an Anthropic report in June titled “When AI Builds Itself,” arguing the technology is already accelerating its development. The volume of code produced per person at Anthropic has increased eight-fold, with Claude writing 80%, the report noted. “We're trying to help substantiate this concept now ... before it becomes something that is politicized or otherwise gains some valence that makes talking about it difficult,” Clark says.
It worked out as Clark feared. “Anthropic is trying to strike terror into everyone’s hearts,” wrote AI skeptic Gary Marcus, adding “all they have really shown is just faster coding.” Skeptics point out that technological progress has always compounded. Oil is used to drill oil. Why, in AI’s case, should the curve suddenly bend upward? For a company betting on continued advances, they argued, the claim is plainly self-serving.
Even Clark concedes coding volume is a crude yardstick. Claude’s code can be long-winded. But the trouble runs deeper. Neither Claude nor any large language model is written in code at all. Researchers set growth conditions—deciding the size and shape of a neural network, then pour an internet’s worth of text through it, letting it adjust itself billions of times until abilities to answer questions, write code, and hold a conversation emerge. They are cultivated, the way one grows a plant by tending the soil and the light without ever deciding where a single leaf will go.
Progress, therefore, depends on trial and error. If Claude could take over that cycle, designing, running, and analyzing experiments, would progress accelerate gradually… or suddenly explode? And if it did, could anyone pump the brakes? The uncomfortable truth is that the people building the technology are nearly as much in the dark as everyone else.
Claude began beating the benchmarks
The change Clark had walked into was not entirely unexpected. Fellow Anthropic co-founder and chief science officer Jared Kaplan had long feared that AI would eventually accelerate research, perhaps outpacing safety efforts. In early 2025, he folded a warning into the company’s Responsible Scaling Policy, its plan for managing AI’s growing dangers. Back then, Claude was no good at running experiments. But he believed that would change one day, and Anthropic would need to be ready.
To find out whether that day was coming, Anthropic built a series of tests—tasks that would take a human expert hours. Could Claude train a smaller AI model from scratch? Could it program a virtual robot dog? No single measure would settle it, but together they offered a snapshot.
In one test, Claude had to rewrite a piece of code to use GPUs—the chips for training AI—more efficiently. In spring, it momentarily got them running seven times faster, then broke the code. By summer, a newer Claude pushed the same speedup from seven times faster to 73 without introducing errors. “We started seeing these tasks fall over,” says Daniel Freeman, a member of Anthropic’s frontier red team who designed the evaluations....

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This is what the former Google employees are up to. With Google's acceptance if not its blessing.

From the New York Times, August 5:

Four Top Google A.I. Researchers Form New Start-Up
Jeff Dean, who for years was one of Google’s most important executives, is leading the new artificial intelligence company with the backing of Google.

Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, and three other artificial intelligence researchers are leaving the company to form their own start-up, a move that exposes the changing power structure inside Google and shows there is still plenty of venture money willing to back new A.I. ideas.
Dr. Dean, Google’s 30th employee, is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of the company. He played a key role in creating the global computer network powering its search business and was one of the company’s early leaders in A.I. research.
His profile inside Google appeared to wane in recent years as other executives, including the co-founder Sergey Brin, asserted control over Google’s all-in bet on A.I. But Dr. Dean remained one of the key engineers driving the creation of the company’s most important technologies.
His new company, called Discovery Loop, joins a growing list of prominent start-ups chasing a goal that has obsessed Silicon Valley researchers for decades. Dr. Dean and his collaborators want to build A.I. that can improve itself with little or no help from humans.
They believe that this mind-bending process, called recursive self-improvement, can significantly accelerate the development of A.I. The same techniques, they say, can then help design new kinds of computer hardware, discover new drugs, create new materials and speed other forms of scientific discovery.
“We think there is opportunity for A.I. to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop,” Dr. Dean said in an interview at his home in Silicon Valley. “You will get both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific breakthroughs and advances.”
As Google battles to match the A.I. delivered by smaller companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, prominent researchers, lured by a deep pool of venture funding and the chance to run their own companies, continue to leave the tech giant.
Over the past year, Google lost several top researchers, including Peter Norvig, who spent 25 years as Google’s head of research, to A.I. start-ups such as Recursive Superintelligence, one of the many other companies focused on recursive self-improvement.
“It is just a very different environment inside a start-up. It is much more fast-paced and focused,” said Tim Rocktäschel, who left Google earlier this year to help found Recursive Superintelligence. “You are a smaller team. There is much less bureaucracy and politics.”
Dr. Dean, 58, expected to leave Google in the next few days for his new job as the start-up’s chief executive. He will be joined by Sanjay Ghemawat, his close collaborator of more than two decades; Quoc Le, whose research helped inspire the creation of today’s A.I. chatbots; and Oriol Vinyals, who had overseen the design of Google’s chatbot technologies with Dr. Dean since 2023.
The new company is backed by seed funding from Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures and several Silicon Valley investors, including Google’s parent company. The departing Google researchers declined to reveal how much money their start-up has raised, but they appear to be leaving Google on good terms. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has also agreed to provide the computing power they need to build their A.I. technologies for at least the next year, Dr. Dean said.
“Over 27 years, Jeff and Sanjay helped to drive some of the most significant technology transitions, from our early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped create the modern A.I. era,” Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said in a statement. “On a personal note, it’s been a privilege to work alongside Jeff and Sanjay.”
Google will collaborate with the new start-up, Mr. Pichai said.
Dr. Vinyals said he believed it was important to have the freedom to shape their own company. “Having extreme focus is very powerful,” he said in an interview. “The ultimate form of extreme focus is when it is the only thing that matters — when it aligns with the mission of the company.”
Dr. Dean joined Google in 1999. Along with Dr. Ghemawat and others, he designed the enormously complex software systems that allowed Google’s search engine to reliably and efficiently respond to search queries from billions of people across the world....

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If interested see also:

January 28 - So it Begins: "Silicon Valley Wants to Build A.I. That Can Improve A.I. on Its Own"

The headline at TechCrunch was "AI chip startup Ricursive hits $4B valuation two months after launch"
Serious money believes these women are on to something.

April 26 - U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent On A.I.: "'a year, maybe 18 months,' before the new technology defines our lives across the board."

May 8 - AI: "Are we just 18 months away from everything changing?"

May 12 - "AI Is Starting to Build Better AI"