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.
The company should not be confused with Ricursive Intelligence, which is pursuing a similar goal 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.
Dr. Socher was previously head of A.I. research at the business software maker Salesforce and chief executive of the A.I. start-up You.com. His seven co-founders include notable researchers from many of the industry’s leading A.I. companies, including Josh Tobin, Jeff Clune and Tim Shi, all from OpenAI, and Yuandong Tian from Meta.
Many of these researchers specialize in a kind of A.I. development called “open-endedness.” This involves building software systems that can run for days, months or even years in pursuit of goals set by the researchers.
Recursive Superintelligence has also hired Peter Norvig, who spent 25 years as director of research at Google and co-wrote an A.I. textbook (“Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach”) that has been a standard inside universities for three decades.
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 — and so on.
Though many researchers are bullish on the idea of A.I.’s recursively improving itself, others point out the current technology is long way from the point where humans can be removed from the loop. Humans — like Dr. Socher — must still generate the new ideas that drive A.I. development forward.
The aim, however, is to push more and more work onto machines, including the generation of new ideas.
OpenAI has said it is now building an “automated A.I. researcher.” By the fall, the company hopes to have a system that can do the work of a “less experienced” researcher, said Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive. Similar efforts are underway at other leading companies.
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.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
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