Recursive Self-Improvement, Cornhole Robots, and the Year Everyone Moved the Goalposts Forward

I spent a chunk of Sunday arvo down a Reddit hole on r/singularity, which is never a great sign for my mental health but always good for a blog post. Among the usual parade of “AI did an amazing thing” clips, two items stuck with me. One: a Google model apparently built a whole photorealistic pagoda complex in Blender from a single prompt, agents critiquing their own work like a tiny obsessive design studio with no lunch breaks. Two: the same family of model taught a humanoid robot to play cornhole from watching one human video, built its own physics simulator to practise in, then landed seven bags in a row on the real robot. Google’s line is that this turns weeks of robotics engineering into hours.

And then, almost buried under the robot content, Anthropic’s Jack Clark moved his prediction for “full recursive self-improvement” forward a year, to 2027. That’s the headline that actually sat with me longer than the pagoda did.

Recursive self-improvement, for anyone who hasn’t marinated in this stuff, is the idea that an AI system gets good enough at AI research that it starts improving itself, and the next version is better at improving itself again, and so on. It’s the engine room of every “singularity” story you’ve ever half-read. The comments under Clark’s prediction did what Reddit always does with a big claim: tore it apart from six directions at once. One bloke pointed out that Clark only shifted his estimate by a year, which is a pretty modest adjustment dressed up as a thunderclap. Another argued, convincingly I thought, that current transformer architectures have hard technical walls around this: a model’s weights are frozen at inference time, training a model on its own outputs tends to degrade it rather than improve it, and “unconstrained exponential improvement” might be more pipe dream than physics. Someone else dismissed Clark entirely as a pundit who talks his book because Anthropic needs the hype to keep the funding taps open. All of those things can be true at once. He has a financial interest in the story being exciting. He also has more visibility into frontier labs than almost anyone posting about it. Neither fact cancels the other out.

This is the bit I keep coming back to with AI discourse generally: everyone is extremely confident, and the confident people disagree with each other completely. I work in IT, I’ve watched tools go from “cute autocomplete” to “writes working code I’d have charged a client for two years ago” in about eighteen months, and I still don’t know if what I’m watching is the early stage of something genuinely transformative or the most expensive game of Jenga humanity has ever played. I hold both views on a Tuesday, depending on which demo I’ve just watched.

What struck me about the pagoda and the cornhole robot isn’t the headline capability, it’s the compounding. A model that can build its own training loop, its own physics sim, its own critique-and-refine cycle, is a model that’s getting faster at getting faster. Whether that scales all the way to Clark’s recursive self-improvement or whether it hits a wall made of diminishing returns and physical silicon, I genuinely don’t know, and I’d trust anyone who tells me with total certainty a little less, not more.

I think about my daughter, who’s picking subjects for next year, and the shrug I now give when she asks whether a particular career will “still be a thing.” A decade ago I’d have had an opinion. Now my honest answer is that I don’t know, and neither does anyone confidently predicting a date on Reddit. There’s a particular kind of vertigo in watching a robot learn cornhole in an afternoon and realising the skill gap between “good at manual tasks” and “good at research tasks” might close faster than anyone’s labour market planning accounts for. Centrelink and the Fair Work Commission are not exactly famous for moving at AI speed.

None of which means I think the sky is falling, or that I’m cancelling my subscription to being cautiously fascinated by this stuff. I still think there’s something genuinely remarkable happening, the kind of thing that, if you’d shown it to me in 2015, I’d have assumed was a tech demo reel rather than a Tuesday. But remarkable and safe aren’t the same word, and the people building this are, by their own admission in these comment threads, not entirely sure which one we’re going to get. I’d just like the people setting policy around it to be having the same argument the Reddit commenters are having, instead of the much simpler one about who gets there first.