Schmidhuber traces four decades of recursive self-improvement research to 1987

Jürgen Schmidhuber's new post surveys his recursive self-improvement (RSI) work since 1987, from self-modifying policies and the Gödel Machine to modern LLM agents.

His background note says he published the first concrete RSI algorithms in 1987, when compute was about 100,000,000 times more expensive, and argues software RSI is now practical while full RSI will also require self-improving hardware in the physical world.