Section 5.3 · A taxonomy
Three flavours of recursive self-improvement
The report maps self-improvement onto three processes drawn from human evolution.
Genotypic Code & architecture Rewrite the 'DNA' | Memetic Data & knowledge Already visible today | Sociogenic Cooperation & roles Group-level | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Biological analogue | Genetic evolution | Cultural transmission | Social organisation |
| What improves | Source code & model architecture | Training data & learned knowledge | Coordination & division of labour |
| AI example | Self-rewriting architectures | Synthetic data, distillation, 'thinking' models | Specialised agents forming a group agent |
| Acceleration potential | High, but poorly understood | Visible via test-time scaling | Emergent, hard to predict |