Can AI self-improvement overcome diminishing returns?
Can AI self-improvement overcome diminishing returns?AI self-improvement may not be powerful enough to overcome diminishing returns. Even RSI may not lead to a fast takeoff to ASI (superintelligence).Ramez NaamSep 27, 20264426ShareThis is a cross-post of my guest post on Noahpinion, which Noah Smith kindly invited me to write. Thanks to Noah for the many conversations, and for encouraging and needling me to actually write this.1.
- ▪Can AI self-improvement overcome diminishing returns?AI self-improvement may not be powerful enough to overcome diminishing returns.
- ▪Even RSI may not lead to a fast takeoff to ASI (superintelligence).Ramez NaamSep 27, 20264426ShareThis is a cross-post of my guest post on Noahpinion, which Noah Smith kindly invited me to write.
- ▪Thanks to Noah for the many conversations, and for encouraging and needling me to actually write this.1.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 6,774 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (AI / LLM) |
| Canonical URL | https://www.rameznaam.com/p/ai-rsi-isnt-leading-to-super-intelligence |
| Publication time | Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:06:31 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-29T04:09:40.668Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-29T04:09:40.668Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | YLtCWugww_Sm · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Can AI self-improvement overcome diminishing returns?AI self-improvement may not be powerful enough to overcome diminishing returns. Even RSI may not lead to a fast takeoff to ASI (superintelligence).Ramez NaamSep 27, 20264426ShareThis is a cross-post of my guest post on Noahpinion, which Noah Smith kindly invited me to write. Thanks to Noah for the many conversations, and for encouraging and needling me to actually write this.1. AI is Helping Improve ItselfAI is already helping improve itself. The question is whether even fully autonomous recursive self-improvement (RSI) would cause a runaway intelligence explosion.This Substack is reader-supported.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (AI / LLM).
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