OpenAI · Sam Altman · 2025-06-10
The Gentle Singularity: "a larval version of recursive self-improvement"
“Of course this isn’t the same thing as an AI system completely autonomously updating its own code, but nevertheless this is a larval version of recursive self-improvement.”
- Who
- OpenAI, Sam Altman
- Date
- 2025-06-10 The blog page shows no date. Date from the blog's own Atom feed (published 2025-06-10).
- Evidence
- Not rated. A blog essay stating a view, with no measured result behind it. how we rate evidence
- Replication
- Nothing to rerun. all claims
- Checked
- 2026-10-27, against the source page
- Links
- Source
Also on the page
- In the paragraph before: "Advanced AI is interesting for many reasons, but perhaps nothing is quite as significant as the fact that we can use it to do faster AI research."
- The sentence the quote qualifies: "From here on, the tools we have already built will help us find further scientific insights and aid us in creating better AI systems."
- He then names "other self-reinforcing loops": a "flywheel of compounding infrastructure buildout", and "robots that can build other robots (and in some sense, datacenters that can build other datacenters)", which he says "aren’t that far off".
- The post opens: "We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started." Later: "the singularity happens bit by bit, and the merge happens slowly."
More from OpenAI
- 2026-10-21 Matthew Berman interview: "speed limits or whatever on how quickly we let RSI go"
- 2026-09-21 Building standards for the next phase of AI
- 2026-09-06 An Alien Mind
- 2026-09-06 Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI
Dated predictions
- Sam Altman: 10 dated predictions, the earliest on 2023-05-22
- OpenAI: 4 dated predictions, the earliest on 2023-07-05