[ExI] Recursive exponential improvement

[John Clark]

*Coincidentally just a few hours after I started this thread I found
another article about Recursive  Exponential Improvement, although that
particular phrase is not used. It's from yesterday's issue of the journal
Nature. *

*What is the future of intelligence? The answer could lie in the story of
its evolution* <https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03857-0>

*The article is well worth reading in its entirety, but it is rather long,**
here are the parts that I found most interesting: *

*"A predator must predict actions that will get the prey into its stomach;
the prey must predict the predator’s behaviour to stop that from happening.
Starting in the 1970s, neuropsychologists and anthropologists began to
realize that other intelligent entities are often the most important parts
of the environment to model — because they are the ones modelling you back,
whether with friendly or hostile intent. Increasingly intelligent predators
put evolutionary pressure on their prey to become smarter, and vice versa."*

*"The pressures towards intelligence become even more intense for members
of social species. Winning mates, sharing resources, gaining followers,
teaching, learning and dividing labour: all of these involve modelling and
predicting the minds of others. But the more intelligent you become — the
better to predict the minds of others (at least in theory) — the more
intelligent, and thus hard to predict, those others have also become,
because they are of the same species and doing the same thing. These
runaway dynamics produce ‘intelligence explosions’. Over the past billion
years, symbiogenesis has produced increasingly complex nervous systems,
colonies of social animals — and eventually our own technological society.
Is this nature’s version of Moore’s law?" *

*"Since around 2006, transistors have continued to shrink, but the rise in
semiconductor operating speed has stalled. To keep increasing computer
performance, chip-makers are instead adding more processing cores. They
began, in other words, to parallelize silicon-based computation. It’s no
coincidence that this is when modern, neural-net-based AI models finally
began to take off." *

*"AI is not distinct from humanity, but rather is a recent addition to a
mutually interdependent superhuman entity we are all already part of. An
entity that has long been partly biological, partly technological — and
always wholly computational. The picture of the future that emerges here is
sunnier than that often painted by researchers studying the ethics of AI or
its existential risks for humanity. People often presume that evolution —
and intelligence — are zero-sum optimization processes, and that AI is both
alien to and competitive with humanity. The symbiogenetic view does not
guarantee positive outcomes, but neither does it position AI as an alien
‘other’, nor the future as a Malthusian tug-of-war over resources between
humans and machines." *

*John K Clark*






On Tue, Nov 25, 2025 at 7:08 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

*Last week Google introduced Gemini-3 and against all the benchmarks it
> easily beat all other AI's. However, its superiority did not last long.
> Yesterday Anthropic introduced Claude Opus-4.5 and it easily beat Gemini-3
> in the ability to write computer code. One thing I found particularly
> interesting, since it started A**nthropic has always had a policy that
> before they hired anybody they gave them a notoriously difficult computer
> programming test that the applicant could take home and bring back the next
> day; they decided to give Claude Opus-4.5 that test and give it a two hour
> time limit to complete it. The result was Claude Opus-4.5 got a higher
> score on coding ability than ANY human candidate ever had! If that isn't
> screaming "recursive exponential improvement" I don't know what could. *
>
> *And to think, some people are still worried about trivialities like the
> war on Christmas, illegal immigration, global warming, and the US not
> balancing the budget. *
>
>
> *Claude Opus 4.5 just dropped
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhuUcVhwqi8&list=WL&index=3>*
>
> *John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
> <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>*
> 2df
>
>
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