Notable Researchers Join $4 Billion Effort to Build Self-Improving A.I.
Notable Researchers Join $4 Billion Effort to Build Self-Improving A.I.
Publish Date: 2026-05-13 05:02:00
Source Domain: www.nytimes.com
Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI released new A.I. systems late last year that were particularly good at writing computer code.
In recent months, the technology has rapidly remade the way that Silicon Valley’s 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.
Now, many of the world’s leading researchers believe that A.I. will soon be powerful enough to improve itself with little or no help from human developers.
“A.I. is code. And now, A.I. can code,” a veteran researcher, Richard Socher, said. “The ingredients are there.”
Dr. Socher recently founded, with seven other researchers, a company to pursue this mind-bending goal, which is often called “recursive self-improvement.”
His start-up, Recursive Superintelligence, has raised more than $650 million from venture capital firms including Google Ventures and 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.
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