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Recursive Self-Improvement and the Future of AI

a16z General Partner Martin Casado sits down with MakerMaker.AI co-founders Dhaval Adjodah and Owen He to unpack recursive self-improvement, or RSI, and separate the increasingly popular term from what it would actually mean for an AI system to improve itself. Dhaval and Owen distinguish true RSI from simply using AI to automate pieces of AI development. Their goal is a closed loop where the system being improved is also doing the improving, across components including models, harnesses, and eventually more of the AI stack. They explain why closing that loop still doesn’t guarantee runaway “takeoff,” and why measuring real progress requires accounting for both capability gains and the resources required to achieve them. They also share what they’re seeing in their own research, including early signs that self-improving systems can increase performance while improving efficiency. And they dig into the practical challenges of proving those gains are real, from variance and reward hacking to the enormous difficulty of distinguishing genuine improvement from noise. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 00:58 - What actually counts as RSI 05:10 - Capability as a numerator and denominator 06:58 - Closed loop vs takeoff 08:32 - Humans as agents in the system 13:39 - Why most RSI papers don't scale 17:41 - Why they chose inference 24:00 - "It's not a belief, it's happening" 25:42 - The Viceroy of Variance 29:39 - The garden hose company in Wisconsin Resources: Follow Dhaval Adjodah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rand0m Follow Owen He on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/owen-he-b7b064279/ Follow Martin Casado on X: https://x.com/martin_casado Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends! Find a16z on X: https://twitter.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Listen to the a16z Show on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX Listen to the a16z Show on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711 Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see http://a16z.com/disclosures.

Dhaval AdjodahguestOwen HeguestMartin Casadohost
Oct 12, 202632mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 0:58

    Intro

    1. DA

      The fundamental idea here is to build AI that improves itself, and I think we're getting there.

    2. OH

      For the first time, we could swap the optimizer as the optimizee, and this leads to a reinvestment of cognitive improvement into itself.

    3. DA

      You can think of RSI many different levels of the stack. Prompts, harness, weights, and you can go all the way to basically chips. Our goal here is to optimize all the levels of the stack.

    4. OH

      Our approach to RSI is that we have a multi-agent system working together that's being recursively improved.

    5. MC

      I'm so impressed by your belief that, like, this idea [chuckles] of a model improving itself-

    6. DA

      But it's not a belief.

    7. MC

      It is a dramatic statement, which is-- I think it's the first time I've heard you say it.

    8. DA

      Because we have been so thorough, we have not released things until we're super sure it's correct.

    9. MC

      Do you envision a system where the amount of energy that goes into it somehow decreases over time relative to the improvement?

    10. DA

      We can't share too much, but one of the very important things that we've tried to do-

  2. 0:58 – 5:10

    What actually counts as RSI

    1. MC

      Welcome both of you, uh, for joining. We're gonna be talking about everybody's favorite topic, which is RSI, Recursive Self-Improvement. Maybe to start, it'd be great to just introduce yourselves and your backgrounds, then we'll talk a little bit about what you're working on now, and then we'll dig into the, the, the content.

    2. DA

      Yeah. I, I, I think of myself as like, um, a physicist of some kind. I, I studied that, then I did a PhD in reinforcement learning at the MIT Media Lab. I really like building things, and I'm very excited to be building, um, a cool startup, MakerMaker, with Owen and Grace.

    3. OH

      My name is Owen. Um, I was, uh, first studying math, and then one day I realized that all mathematicians do is are proving theorems, and I was taking a class called Formal Language and Logic, and they were showing how you can build a theorem prover.

    4. DA

      Yeah.

    5. OH

      And I was like, "Oh, that would be cool. I can just build a machine that prove theorems for me." That's how I got into AI.

    6. DA

      Amazing.

    7. OH

      And then for my PhD, I worked on continual learning and meta learning, then worked for a few years at DeepMind as a research scientist. Now I'm working on RSI.

    8. MC

      I see a lot of pitches come in, and a lot of them use the term RSI. And I'll be like, "Oh, so what do you do?" And they'll say, "We use AI to create AI." "That sounds very interesting. So what do you do?" "We use AI to create GPU kernels."

    9. DA

      Mm.

    10. MC

      Which that doesn't, to me, kind of map the definition of what I would consider to be RSI. So maybe can we start by you defining what you think or what you would include in RSI definitionally?

    11. OH

      Yeah. I think RSI is definitely an overloaded term today. Um, many people when they say RSI, they mean different things. Um, so I think the important thing when you are differentiating them is to ask the question, what is the optimizer and what is the optimizee? Like when you're im-- self-improving, who is improving, right? So, um, there, there are people who are saying, "Okay, we're doing RSI. We have human using AI to develop better AI."

    12. MC

      Yeah.

    13. OH

      But that to us is just, um, autocatalysis-

    14. MC

      Yeah

    15. OH

      ... in a sense that the improver is still human with, uh, tools, even though these tools are getting better and better, but the ideas and the improvement come from human brains.

    16. MC

      Right. And, and just-

    17. OH

      Yeah

    18. MC

      ... I don't mean to interrupt, but-

    19. OH

      Yeah

    20. MC

      ... to be clear, most technical epochs have had autocatalytic effects, right? Like there's no way you can create a computer chip without a computer, right?

    21. OH

      Right.

    22. MC

      You could argue that the internet development was sped up by the fact that people that weren't geographically located could coordinate, right? I mean, the steam engine, you could build better steam engines 'cause you could get coal faster, et cetera. So this notion of like using the thing to build the thing faster is not new.

    23. DA

      Right.

    24. MC

      And so you're saying something different.

    25. OH

      Yes. I think for us, um, in, in the history, right, over civilization, we have this autocatalysis, you know, computer-- using computers to build better computers. But the, the idea for this change, for this improvement, come from human brain. But that human brain was never the improvee, we- never the optimizee.

    26. MC

      Ah, right.

    27. OH

      Right? Whereas when now, w- for the first time, we could swap the optimizer as the optimizee. So the, the brain of the agents, which is the LM, the model, can be the thing that you're optimizing, and this leads to a compound, this reinvestment of cognitive improvement into itself.

    28. MC

      But there has to be a reason that you decided to take on this hard problem as opposed to what anybody else would do, which is like chew off pieces of the problem.

    29. DA

      Yeah.

    30. OH

      Yeah.

  3. 5:10 – 6:58

    Capability as a numerator and denominator

    1. DA

      difference. What's really different here can be explained pretty easily.

    2. MC

      Yeah.

    3. DA

      So if you think of capability-

    4. MC

      Yeah

    5. DA

      ... what we're trying to do here is we're trying to improve the rate of improvement of ca-capability, right? So like the first derivative of capability with respect to time is the thing that everybody's trying to improve.

    6. MC

      Yeah.

    7. DA

      Right? And now you can put that to be equal, driven by two things, the n-nominators and the denominator. The nomina-nominators would be performance-

    8. MC

      Yeah

    9. DA

      ... which is what everybody's trying to improve, and then the denominator is some kind of cost. Let's say capital-

    10. MC

      Yeah

    11. DA

      ... right, or difficulty.

    12. MC

      Yeah.

    13. DA

      And this one is pretty s- is pretty set because the higher the capability, the higher c- ... the difficulty of the next step, right? Now, the numerator is the interesting part. For things like steam engines and whatnot, that was fixed.

    14. MC

      Yeah.

    15. DA

      Right? So then you end up with a very simple differential equation where-

    16. MC

      Yeah

    17. DA

      ... you basically plateau.

    18. MC

      Yeah.

    19. DA

      Right? Now, if you have a system where the improvee, the things being improved, is also the thing that's doing the improvement-

    20. MC

      Yeah

    21. DA

      ... you, how-- You, you now have an, a new way to think about it, and the, the simplest case would be that the numerator is also correlated with capability-

    22. MC

      Yeah

    23. DA

      ... which makes sense, right?

    24. MC

      Yeah.

    25. DA

      Because the better you are, the better you are at also improving.

    26. MC

      Yeah.

    27. DA

      And if you do that, the math cancels out and you basically get constant improvement over time. That's, that could be one level of, of RSI, right? And then there's one more case, which is-

    28. MC

      Yeah

    29. DA

      ... now that the, the numerator could be correlated with a higher power of capability.

    30. MC

      Yeah.

  4. 6:58 – 8:32

    Closed loop vs takeoff

    1. DA

      Hmm.

    2. MC

      Like, for some reason, when people see a, um, a graph where there's like a, a circle with an arrow to another circle-

    3. DA

      Yes

    4. MC

      ... th- and it goes back, and they look at that closed control system and they say, "Takeoff." [laughs]

    5. DA

      Yeah. [laughs]

    6. MC

      Right? Which, I mean, if this is a nonlinear control system-

    7. DA

      Mm-hmm

    8. MC

      ... it's very difficult to know-

    9. DA

      Yes

    10. MC

      ... what the hell happens. By the way, most people don't seem to understand this distinction-

    11. DA

      Hmm

    12. MC

      ... because we very quickly go to, like, takeoff and FOOMing-

    13. DA

      Yeah

    14. MC

      ... and all that stuff when we talk about these things.

    15. DA

      Well, as a network guy, you know that it depends on the exponent of, you know, your, your function-

    16. MC

      Yeah, right

    17. DA

      ... that's, that's self-referencing.

    18. MC

      Yeah.

    19. DA

      And it's-- What we found is that it's almost not useful to speculate on what we think could happen, because this is really an empirical problem, and the real way to know what's happening is to test things. And testing things is really, really hard. Like, reward hacking is one of, you know, many problems that we have to deal with. But the, the question you're asking is very empirical, and for some algorithm-

    20. MC

      Oh, interesting. So, but, so I'm a networker, that's how I would've answered.

    21. DA

      Yes.

    22. MC

      I would've thought math people would've been like, "We've got this cl- [laughs] we've got this differential equation-"

    23. DA

      Yeah.

    24. MC

      "... and I took out my pencil-"

    25. DA

      Yeah.

    26. MC

      "... and I wrote down the answer."

    27. OH

      I mean, it is possible to write down the differential equation, but you still have to empirically dif-, uh, measure the, the variable, the exponent impact.

    28. MC

      So there's no analytical solution.

    29. DA

      I mean, honestly, we don't even have a learning theory of deep learning. We don't know, like, fundamentally why it works.

    30. MC

      Yeah.

  5. 8:32 – 13:39

    Humans as agents in the system

    1. DA

      Right? And, and then now you're like, you know, five, six layers on top of deep learning, and so we don't have a good theory. I think the closest things we have are scaling laws, and these are empirical laws.

    2. OH

      I think one misunderstanding people have about, like, our approach to RSI is that they think the entire system has to be fully automatic and digital. But actually, if you look at our mathematical foundation, we have a multi-agent system, not just one digital agent. And in, in this multi-agent system, human researchers and engineers are actually a special case of these agents. And it's this hybrid system of multiple agents working together that's being recursively improved.

    3. DA

      I see.

    4. OH

      And we don't want to leave out any component to not optimizing them, because, like, if it's possible to optimize the model, why wouldn't we do that? 'Cause you will have more gains if you do include those. Anything that you don't optimize will later become your bottleneck.

    5. MC

      Yeah. So one observation that, um, uh, uh, we have, we have made here is, um, there are claims of, uh, speed is improving, which is actually the case, right? So if you look at, like, the model release time, it is reducing. And so on one hand, you could be like, okay, so clearly we're in some sort of a, you know, a rapidly improving phase. But if you divide by the actual amount of capital raised by these companies, that's no longer the case, right? [chuckles] And so you're like, well, maybe they just raise a whole bunch of money, and then, like, AI allows you to apply that money. So how would you-- This is not for yourself, but how would you encourage people that are e- either evaluating claims about this or even working on them to think about not fooling yourself by throwing more money at the problem? Like, you're actually showing that you're making an improvement here that's meaningful with the denominator.

    6. DA

      I think for us it's, it's pretty straightforward. It's because if you get improvement and they just come at more and more resources being poured in, it's not RSI. You have to be able to back your claim of how much improvement you're getting.

    7. MC

      But do you include, like, all the man-hours and experimentation that went into that? Because I, I feel like at some level, like, that, like, it's like, like, they'll talk about, like, the actual flops that go in-

    8. DA

      Yeah

    9. MC

      ... and money that go in, but the reality is this is, like, the 23rd experiment and-

    10. DA

      Yeah

    11. MC

      ... there's actually a human ex- burning a lot of mental capital to get to that final configuration.

    12. DA

      Yeah.

    13. MC

      Like, do you actually include that in the denominator?

    14. DA

      I th- we do, and I think it's, it's good company discipline to do that.

    15. MC

      Yeah, yeah.

    16. DA

      And we've tried, again, to very intentionally from the beginning have a culture of tracking where things go, cost, time, all that kind of stuff. I'll share a funny thing. Internally, we have this thing, people ca- talk about leaderboards, you know-

    17. MC

      Gotcha

    18. DA

      ... which is like score.

    19. MC

      Yeah.

    20. DA

      You know what I'm about to say. [chuckles] We have something called a bleeder board-

    21. MC

      Mm-hmm

    22. DA

      ... where we keep track of the cost of, of experiments of everybody-

    23. MC

      That's amazing

    24. DA

      ... who's running experiments.

    25. MC

      That's awesome.

    26. DA

      You know, and, and everybody, it's the com- everybody any day can look at, like, who's, who's high up on the, on the bleeder board.

    27. OH

      I can also give an example from AI. Um, I don't know if you know this NanoGPT benchmark people are running.

    28. DA

      Yeah. Yeah, sure.

    29. OH

      It's basically asking you to retrain GPT-2, which when it just came out, it's a very expensive model to train, and it takes weeks, I think-

    30. DA

      Yeah

  6. 13:39 – 17:41

    Why most RSI papers don't scale

    1. MC

      I mean, that's a pretty meaningful statement, which is awesome.

    2. DA

      What we found is that a lot of the papers that claim to do RSI, when we test it in our internal infra, we find that they don't work. And a lot of it is because they are cool ideas that humans try to introspect and say, "Oh, you know, this is what I think should happen."

    3. MC

      Yeah.

    4. DA

      They're complicated. They sound cool. They get you a good paper. But then when we test it at scale, you know, on benchmarks, on real economic problems, they don't scale.

    5. MC

      Right.

    6. DA

      And what we found is that the s- the simpler thing that closes the loop is the thing that scales. I would say one thing that we do that's probably unique is that we always start with a very grounded mathematical framework that, that basically lays out the map of the whole space.

    7. MC

      Yeah.

    8. DA

      And the reason is because this space is so large that if you don't do that and you don't have this very principled way of doing it, you get lost very quickly in this complexity.

    9. MC

      Yeah.

    10. DA

      And the other reason is that often when you have this really complex system, there's two extremes of how you can build it. You can take an approach where you basically build like 200 different systems-

    11. MC

      Yeah

    12. DA

      ... and you hope that, like, this, this, this, you know, what is it? The Rube Goldberg machine will kind of work out.

    13. MC

      [laughs] Yes. Yes.

    14. DA

      Or you take the other way, and you're, you kind of basically spend some time thinking about these 200 things, and maybe you realize, you know, there are actually just 12, um, abstractions that generalize to these 200 things. And so what we have tried, um, to, to create a culture of, let's really think from first principles. Let's, you know, look at the math, and then we realize what are the assumptions we make to be practical, because you have to do both, and then y- we see what works. And, and when you do that, you then can see that, oh, you know, these, like, multiple papers or ideas are actually, you know, subclasses of the same general framework.

    15. MC

      Yeah.

    16. DA

      And if you do that well, you can scale.

    17. MC

      Yeah.

    18. DA

      And I think, um, that's, that's one thing that I see that's missing and that's hard to do and, and takes a very unusual group of people to, to really, like, make that work.

    19. OH

      I think Richard Feynman said o-once that there are two kind of sciences. There, there's stamp collections and then there are physics.

    20. MC

      Yeah.

    21. OH

      So without a unified math framework, all this research are sort of just stamp collections. You could-- Like, a lot of this paper we're reading, they're just ideas inspired by some human behavior, and then they try to mimic that and say, "Oh, look, we have RSI." But then if you don't put into a unified system, you don't know if the, the overall system is actually improving or you're, you're just, like, locally applying an idea that, that's getting better. So what we have is that we're putting all these components that you could possibly recursively improve into a unified framework and look at it from a holistic view so that improving one part, um, does not negatively impact the other part. Right?

    22. DA

      I see. I see.

    23. OH

      So, so for example, there are people who are doing recursive improvement just on harness, and then there are people who are only doing on weights.

    24. MC

      Yeah.

    25. OH

      But weights and harnesses are not isolated component. They have impact on each other.

    26. DA

      Y-you can think of RSI many different levels of the stack, right? You can think of, um, prompts, um, harness, weights-

    27. MC

      Yeah

    28. DA

      ... and you can go all the way to basically chips, right?

    29. MC

      Yeah, sure. Yeah.

    30. DA

      And our, our goal here is to optimize all the levels of the stack, right?

  7. 17:41 – 24:00

    Why they chose inference

    1. DA

      make it work.

    2. MC

      Can you talk a little bit about the problem domain that you're going after just to prove that this works?

    3. DA

      Um, we are trying very hard to pick areas of the AI space that are as close as possible to AI itself. Again-

    4. MC

      I see

    5. DA

      ... we try to be recursive.

    6. MC

      Yeah.

    7. DA

      And if you think about it, there's, there's not that many problems that are super close to AI and gives you improvement on both the numerator and denominator.

    8. MC

      Yeah.

    9. DA

      And one of those is the inference problem.

    10. MC

      Yeah.

    11. DA

      Right. Because the more you can spend on, um... Sorry, the more you can get improvements and, and efficiency out of inference, the, the more everything kind of unlocks, right?

    12. MC

      Yeah.

    13. DA

      And it's not just, um, for technical reasons, but also the most promise of both the numerator and den-denominator being improved, right?

    14. MC

      It kind of breaks the mind, right? So like just, just for everybody that's listening to this, there's two improvements going on here, and one of them is the ability of the model to make inference faster, and then the second one is now that the inference is faster, it can do that faster. [chuckles]

    15. DA

      Exactly.

    16. MC

      Right?

    17. DA

      Yes.

    18. MC

      And again, that does not necessarily mean takeoff. That can still, you know, asymptote-

    19. DA

      Yep

    20. MC

      ... at some point.

    21. DA

      Yeah.

    22. MC

      But it's just wild to think of this kind of compounding impact.

    23. DA

      Yeah, yeah. We're a startup. We're not a research lab, and one of the reasons we chose it is because everybody in the world right now wants to serve their own model.

    24. MC

      Yeah.

    25. DA

      And, and everybody wants to use the latest, for example, open weight model, Kimi K3 or whatever just coming out, and they want to be able to serve it as efficiently as possible, right? So it's, it's an economically extremely important problem right now.

    26. MC

      Just for the sa-s-sake of discussion, if, if I, if I wanted to make the inference for Kimi K3 faster, would I use Kimi K3 in a recursive way, or would I use a separate model and system to do that for Kimi K3?

    27. DA

      To improve the serving stack of Kimi K3, you mean?

    28. MC

      Yeah.

    29. DA

      In our... Well, our system, um, is not just using one LLM. You have many different LLMs that are doing many different things-

    30. MC

      Oh, so you're doing-

  8. 24:00 – 25:42

    "It's not a belief, it's happening"

    1. MC

      I'm so impressed by your, your belief that, like, this idea [chuckles] of a model improving itself-

    2. DA

      But it's not a belief No, you've got it correct. That's amazing.

    3. OH

      I mean, also it's a question of what metric you use to, to view the progress, right? So if you use, um, I don't know, benchmark accuracy-

    4. DA

      Yeah

    5. OH

      ... it's upper bounded by 100%. You're never going to see exponential improvement on that-

    6. DA

      Of course. Yeah

    7. OH

      ... because it eventually bottleneck at 100%.

    8. DA

      Of course.

    9. OH

      So, so for a long time, we had this question, how do we even know if something has take off, right, w- if we don't have the right metric?

    10. DA

      It's not a belief that this is happening. I think we're already seeing glimmers of that happening.

    11. MC

      But it is a dramatic statement, which is I, I think it's the first time I've heard you say it. So wait, is this like a, has, has this been kind of, you know, a, a continuous result, or is it relatively recent that you're starting to see glimmers of this?

    12. DA

      No, we-we've been seeing like in, in these results kind of grow and grow and grow over the past few months.

    13. MC

      That's amazing. How do you have confidence in the results given, you know, like it's not working yet and you don't know? [chuckles]

    14. DA

      No, it's not belief. It's, it's empirical measurement.

    15. MC

      That's good.

    16. DA

      But, but also as a, as a company, there's a, there's a very funny thing that, that is happening, which is because we have been so thorough, we have not released things until we're super sure it's correct, right? And every few months, you know, there's like an announcement of something RSI related. We, we look at it, we're like, "We should have released our results or something." And then we look at it, we try to replicate it, and we realize, oh, it's noise. You know, it's cherry-picking. And so it's very, very hard to, to know in this, in this sea of, you know, AI, I don't know what you want to call it, like everybody's trying to do AI RSI stuff to know what's

  9. 25:42 – 29:39

    The Viceroy of Variance

    1. DA

      legit or not. The, the technical answer is you have to be really, really good at measuring things. So for example, we have one of our engineers that we, we, we named him the Viceroy of Variance.

    2. MC

      [laughing]

    3. DA

      That's, that's a real thing. Like his job-

    4. MC

      That's so good

    5. DA

      ... his job is to go and like destroy the results we have and find what's wrong. And we even have little like Slack emojis that we have. There's one where like there's like red laser stuff coming out of his eyes when like he finds that there's bad variance in stuff. One of the things that we found is that, you know, when, when you're dealing with a new benchmark or a new problem of economic value that you want to apply this to, so far we have not found a replacement for what we call quality time. Literally running hundreds of experiments, looking at it, developing an intuition, trying to figure out what is wrong, what is not wrong, what, what is, what is just variance, what is not. What is this weird thing that actually shows that there's, you know, some kind of reward hacking like two levels down, the agent that built the agent that built the agent-

    6. MC

      Yeah

    7. DA

      ... did hack something and now you have these weird results.

    8. MC

      Right.

    9. DA

      It's not easy.

    10. MC

      So when I have dealt with, you know, nonlinear control systems, there's a bunch of-- in, in networking, there's a bunch of degenerate behavior you have to deal with.

    11. DA

      Yes.

    12. MC

      It's not, it's not like just convergence and divergence. You have things like oscillations.

    13. DA

      Yes.

    14. MC

      And this is a very multidimensional problem. So do you have to deal with all of that stuff, like potential oscillations and-

    15. DA

      Absolutely

    16. MC

      ... meaning, meaning like it'll, it'll get good and then it'll get bad, it'll get good and-

    17. DA

      Absolutely

    18. MC

      Okay.

    19. DA

      And then, and then on top of that, you have noise.

    20. MC

      Yeah.

    21. DA

      LLMs are fundamentally super stochastic.

    22. MC

      Yeah.

    23. DA

      So what we find is that specific agent on a specific benchmark, you know, there's levels of noise that sometimes are unpredictable, and some of them are extremely like weird. Like you even have some weird noise that comes from like this GPU and this other GPU. They're both, you know, B200, but have slightly different behaviors like on the physics, and you can see some of that being replicated at the high level. So that's why it has to be an empirical thing.

    24. OH

      So from that, you could already see that intelligence is not a single scalar. It's more like a multi-dimension vector. And there will be domains and field where this RSI will give you takeoff, and there will be dimensions where you might plateau or you will have relatively slow improvement. And I think the, the, the defining factor is what is the slowest component in it. So you're an optimization, um, person. You know that there's this Amdahl's law-

    25. MC

      Of course, yeah

    26. OH

      ... where, you know, uh, like the component, the, the speed up you can get by optimizing a component is-

    27. MC

      That if it-- you just take it, you just take it to zero, yeah.

    28. OH

      Yeah.

    29. MC

      Nothing else dominates.

    30. OH

      Exactly. So, so the digital part we could optimize and accelerate, you could get like a thousand times faster or a million times faster. But if it's only 20% of your overall time, you're only going to get 20% speed up, right?

  10. 29:39 – 31:51

    The garden hose company in Wisconsin

    1. MC

      or-

    2. OH

      Mm

    3. MC

      ... uh, how many different robots I would need to-

    4. OH

      Yeah

    5. MC

      ... to solve. So do you think that we're getting any closer to actually having bounds? 'Cause this, I think this is such a critical question for all of us to answer.

    6. DA

      One of, one of the internal jokes we have in the company is that the, the secret to RSI is somewhere in a garden hose company in Wisconsin. And, and the joke here is that, uh, if Einstein hadn't discovered relativity-

    7. MC

      Yeah

    8. DA

      ... he, um, would not have these, these laws that tell you how speed and, you know, contraction of time works.

    9. MC

      Yeah.

    10. DA

      And if some unfortunate engineer had to design the GPS system, they would have had to find a, find like a correction of time, and they probably would have said like, "No, no, it's clearly not the fabric of space-time that's contracting," right?

    11. MC

      [laughing]

    12. DA

      But I don't know why, but this is the formula I've devised empirically.

    13. MC

      It's like, uh, some absolute, you know-

    14. DA

      Yeah, yeah. Exactly

    15. MC

      ... like some fudge factor.

    16. DA

      Yeah, exactly. Right? And then, and then people later would have been like, "Holy shit, this is, this is like space-time contracting," right?

    17. MC

      [laughs]

    18. DA

      And, and we have this theory that, you know, like RSI right now is, is being thought of let's, let's solve all these like super hard kind of, um, fashionable problem. But what we think is that the complexity of the world is such that the, the real challenges probably exist in spaces that are not being, um, applied to, right?

    19. MC

      Yeah.

    20. DA

      And so that's the joke, that there is some workflow somewhere in a garden hose company in Wisconsin-

    21. MC

      That applies it

    22. DA

      ... that if we solve it, we get-

    23. MC

      Yeah

    24. DA

      ... we get, you know, foom.

    25. MC

      I love it. I just wanna quickly summarize. So you're going after RSI, and in, in your case, this is not autocatalytic effects. This is actual RSI, where the system improves the full system. And for you, it's an actual system, which includes the harness and the weights. Um, if you think about the problem as you've got a numerator and denominator, the numerator is like how good the system gets and the denominator is how much, um, energy goes into it. You believe you're seeing glimmers of the sign where both improve at the same time using this type of approach. Is that correct?

    26. DA

      Yep.

    27. OH

      Yep.

    28. MC

      When can we, uh, uh, expect to hear more from you?

    29. DA

      Um, very soon.

    30. MC

      Amazing.

Episode duration: 32:06

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