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AI models can already do lots of useful things.
You probably used them already to summarise meetings or books.
Mathematicians are finding them useful in solving age-old problems.
Scientists are using them to understand complex proteins and design new drugs.
Each iteration of the frontier models brings what can seem frankly like astonishing, superhuman new capabilities.
The cleverness of these models is approaching a point that computer scientists have long wondered about.
Could an AI model ever design and build an improved version of itself?
Just think what that would mean.
Imagine AI models working night and day to improve themselves without people slowing them down.
So version one designs version two, version two designs version three and so on.
Now this closed loop known as recursive self-improvement would mean that everything
you've heard so far about progress in AI could accelerate even more.
What might have taken decades could become possible in just years or a few months.
A self-improving AI might be the last machine humans would ever need to build.
Optimists predict that self-improvement would lead to something called an intelligence explosion.
Pessimists worry that it would be the first step towards something a lot darker, a technological singularity.