AI recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all (August 2026)

Automated excerpt

The researchers behind it found that AI agents are not yet capable of conducting open-ended AI research—free-form investigations that have no clear-cut answers and require judgment and taste, which may be integral to building self-improving AI. A multi-institution group of researchers, led by Peter Kirgis and Sayash Kapoor at Princeton University, found that AI agents could solve the engineering problems necessary to do AI research but lacked the judgment and creativity to produce original research at the caliber of papers accepted by a top machine-learning conference. The agents also failed to incorporate feedback from subagents or external AI reviewing tools.

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