Sakana AI announces that Jürgen Schmidhuber, a foundational AI researcher, has joined as Chief Scientific Advisor to lead the company's Recursive Self-Improvement Lab. Schmidhuber will help develop physical AI and World Models to advance Japan's robotics and manufacturing innovation.
An essay argues that recursive self-improvement (RSI)—systems that assess their performance and improve themselves—is already underway and represents the most important development toward AGI. The author traces RSI's intellectual history from I.J. Good and von Neumann's 1966 work through modern implementations like the 2025 Darwin Gödel Machine, which empirically validates self-rewrites and has doubled its coding benchmark performance.