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Briefings and ideas about Automated AI research from AI podcast discussions and the research they cite, with links to the original sources.
GovAI's Alan Chan says tracking automated AI research takes three measures: how much is automated, whether progress speeds up, and whether oversight keeps pace. He calls the current evidence uncertain and lab disclosures only a start.
Goodfire's Eric Bigelow said its Silico agent did the research for his Forking Fast paper within a week. He says researchers still need to supply context, close guidance and the scientific taste that agents don't yet have.
Jeffrey Ladish of Palisade Research says automating AI development to stay ahead of China is the most escalatory move. He asks whether Beijing might consider striking data centers. Host Steven Bartlett expects a race anyway.
Nathan Labenz says frontier-lab insiders at The Curve described models feeding their own training data, rivals kept close by distillation, and timelines shorter than 2028. He notes the room leaned toward short timelines.
A preprint credits an unreleased Claude model with the seed of a 3SUM algorithm just below quadratic time. On Moonshots, the result was cited in an argument that labs' internal models are pulling away from open ones.
Recursive CEO Richard Socher said weak AI self-improvement already exists and fuller versions are close. He put superintelligence in his strongest sense, beating all of humanity across ten kinds of intelligence, "probably several decades" away, and expects narrower superhuman abilities such as programming and math within a few years. Alex Wissner-Gross rejected the 20-year timeline, and Peter Diamandis agreed.
Journalist Garrison Lovely argues AI lab workers' leverage is near its peak as labs try to automate AI research, so staying to form safety unions may beat quitting. He says he is no labor-law expert and points leavers to whistleblower help.
Author Garrison Lovely proposes freezing frontier AI: no training run as large as the last, no RL from verifiable rewards, no recursive self-improvement, policed by auditors and chip checks. He admits the economic cost would be significant.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev argued AI research is easier to automate than consumer apps because its experiments have ready-made evals, while app changes must wait for enough users to show statistically significant gains.
Alignment researcher Paul Christiano joined the OpenAI Foundation board, warning that AI automating AI research could outpace safety work; he calls his risk estimates uncertain and says joining isn't an endorsement of OpenAI.
OpenAI's Noam Brown says AI agents may soon work longer than the gap between model releases, leaving too little time for full testing. He agreed that slowing releases would widen the lead of models labs keep in-house.
OpenAI researcher Noam Brown says AI could make AI research perhaps three times faster. He argues that, unlike maths, research waits on sequential experiments and GPUs, so he doubts a 100-fold jump, and says his uncertainty is large.