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a16z Podcast · 3 min · Oct 12, 2026

RSI means the improver is the thing being improved

Dhaval Adjodah

Co-founder, MakerMaker.AI

Was a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab and a program scientist funding AI research at Schmidt Sciences.

  • Martin CasadoHost · General Partner, a16z

    Pioneered software-defined networking; sold Nicira to VMware for $1.26B.

About this segment

They explain why a closed loop differs from human-run autocatalysis, using capability growth as performance over cost. Making the numerator track capability yields constant improvement, not automatic takeoff.

From “Recursive Self-Improvement and the Future of AI”, Oct 12, 2026. Watch the full episode

“if you have a system where the improvee, the things being improved, is also the thing that's doing the improvement, you now have a new way to think about it.”
Dhaval Adjodahat 5:51 · a16z Podcast5:51

Takeaways

  1. A gap in the loop means humans must keep pouring in resources
  2. Capability growth is performance divided by cost or difficulty
  3. If performance tracks capability, you get constant improvement
Watch 3:00 from 4:08

In this episode

Full episode

  1. 4:08RSI means the improver is the thing being improved3:00

  2. 25:29Proving RSI gains requires hunting noise and reward hacking1:44Up next

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 4:20

    Yeah, I think the pragmatic thing would be, just from a control theory perspective, if you have a gap in the system, you can't have a closed loop. And autocatalytic has no closed loop, right? So whatever you improve, there's still a gap. Humans have to come in. you have to pour in other resources to make it work. But if you have a closed loop, you still have to pour in resources, but the marginal gains ideally get either constant or larger over time.

  2. 4:47

    And that's the fundamental difference. I think what's really different here can be explained pretty easily. So if you think of capability, what we're trying to do here is we're trying to improve the rate of improvement of capability. So the first derivative of capability with respect to time is the thing that everybody is trying to improve, right? And now you can put that to be equal, driven by two things, the nominator and the denominator.

  3. 5:32

    The nominator would be performance, which is what everybody is trying to improve. And then the denominator is some kind of cost, let's say capital, right, or difficulty. And this one is pretty set because the higher the capability, the higher the difficulty of the next step, right? Now, the numerator is the interesting part. For things like steam engines and whatnot, that was fixed, right? So then you end up with a very simple differential equation where you basically plateau, right?

  4. 6:03

    Now, if you have a system where the improvee, the things being improved, is also the thing that's doing the improvement, you now have a new way to think about it. And the simplest case would be that the numerator is also correlated with capability, which makes sense, right? Because the better you are, the better you are at also improving. And if you do that, the math cancels out and you basically get constant improvement over time.

  5. 6:30

    That could be one level of RSI, right? And then there's one more case, which is now that the numerator could be correlated with a higher power of capability. And then you get exponential takeoff. Can we dig in a little bit more between RSI's having closed the loop