Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark moves his prediction for self-improving AI forward to 2027

Clark co-founded Anthropic and writes the Import AI newsletter. Based on the numbers, he now believes recursive self-improvement (RSI), where AI systems develop their own successors, could become possible as early as 2027. He had previously expected 2028.

The benchmark doesn't prove that AI systems are already improving themselves, since it only captures a narrow slice of scientific work. But it does show where the debate is heading, away from raw model performance and toward the question of how much independent research work language models can actually take on.

TasteVal only measures part of the picture

P-Zero Research defines research taste as three abilities: identifying which research questions are worth pursuing, designing experiments to answer them, and correctly interpreting the results. TasteVal only tests the last two. Choosing the most promising research direction is often considered the core of scientific intuition, but in TasteVal that decision is already made for the model.

Each of the eight tasks specifies a fixed research goal from AI model development, along with a measurable score. The tasks cover areas like training data selection, pretraining and fine-tuning language models, training on human preferences, and defending against adversarial prompts.

The model decides which experiment to run next and uses the results to guide its following step. To keep coding skill from skewing the outcome, a fixed coding agent runs all experiments on a single Nvidia H100 GPU. Each run ends after 40 GPU-hours of compute or 120 hours of wall-clock time.

The human baseline came from 24 experts who had recently worked at places like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Nvidia, and Microsoft Research. They tackled the same tasks, with at least two people on each one. The best human attempt per task served as the benchmark.