Yuandong Tian on Recursive Self-Improvement

Yuandong Tian spent many years at Meta FAIR and recently left to co-found Recursive Superintelligence, a company building AI that improves itself. In this episode, he tells us why.

We start with his work on computer Go, where he built DarkForest before AlphaGo came out. A few years later came OpenGo, which played Korean professionals on a single GPU and didn't lose a game. He then tried to bring RL to real-world problems and found that the design of the action space mattered more than the algorithm.

We also talk about Coconut, his paper on...