Autonomous Scientific Discovery

SmartApe AI

Nov 13, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

Jeff Dean & Fei-Fei Li: RSI's Physical Limits, Self-Improvement vs. Recursive Self-Improvement

In a Stanford HAI dialogue, Jeff Dean and Fei-Fei Li distinguish self-improvement from recursive self-improvement (RSI), argue RSI has physical limits due to real-world compute constraints, outline Discovery Loop's focus on ML research, engineering, and hardware design, discuss AI's role in autonomous scientific discovery and mathematical verification, and reflect on Transformer, distillation, MoE, and code capabilities as key AI milestones.