Model Releases
In his Pacing AI letter, Dario claims that RSI is starting to happen. The problem with this statement is that both the blog posts he links t…
In his Pacing AI letter, Dario claims that RSI is starting to happen. The problem with this statement is that both the blog posts he links to *and* the system cards for the latest Claude and ChatGPT m
In his Pacing AI letter, Dario claims that RSI is starting to happen. The problem with this statement is that both the blog posts he links to and the system cards for the latest Claude and ChatGPT models make it clear that they are not seeing RSI. In fact, the data Anthropic in particular has released thus far makes the case that, while RSI could happen, it's going to immediately run into steeply diminishing returns and not lead to an unbounded intelligence exploson. Figures and details: 1. Claim in Dario's letter. 2. Quote from Mythos 5.1 system card saying they aren't close to RSI. Risk = low. 3. Quote from Mythos 5.1 system card saying that they believe the coding productivity increase they've seen has been needed just to maintain the current rate of progress. (Because AI progress gets harder over time, not easier.) The challenges of finding better algorithms are eating up the productivity gains of using better and better AI tools, is how I read this. 4. Quote from Mythos 5.0 system card estimating that a 40x productivity increase would be needed to double the rate of AI progress. This is consistent with a scaling law exponent of a bit worse than (1/5), meaning that you need to take the fifth root of researcher productivity to find the rate at which progress improves. That's consistent with plenty of other evidence in how human innovation and scientific results scale with added inputs. In short: Dario may say they're on the verge of RSI. But the system cards for their models disagree, and give us reason to believe that both RSI and simpler AI-augmented productivity gains are subject to steep diminishing returns.
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Source: Gary Marcus (X) | 2026-09-12