> 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.
“It's possible that [being a VC] is quite literally timeless, and when the AIs are doing everything else, that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing."
Interestingly, his justification is not that VCs are measurably good at what they do, but rather that they appear to be so bad at what they do:
“Every great venture capitalist in the last 70 years has missed most of the great companies of his generation... if it was a science, you could eventually dial it in and have somebody who gets 8 out of 10 [right]. There's an intangibility to it, there's a taste aspect, the human relationship aspect, the psychology — by the way a lot of it is psychological analysis."
(Personally, I’m not quite sure he actually believes this - but watching him is a certain kind of masterclass in using spicy takes to generate publicity / awareness / buzz. And by talking about him I’m participating in his clever scheme.)
The author is Leif Wenar, Professor of Philosophy (as well as Humanities, Political Science, and Law) at Stanford.
He’s the author of the book Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World (about which Peter Singer wrote: “Philosophers rarely write big books that could change the world, but Blood Oil is such a book.”)
Wenar studied philosophy at Harvard with John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and was Karl Popper’s research assistant.
May 2025: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/05/screwwor...
June 2026: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/06/screwworm-proble...