What happens when AI starts building itself?

Richard Socher has been a major figure in AI for some time, best known for founding the early chatbot startup You.com and, before that, his work on Imagenet. Now, he’s joining the current generation of research-focused AI startups with Recursive Superintelligence, a San Francisco-based startup that came out of stealth on Wednesday with $650 million in funding. Socher is joined in the new venture by a cohort of prominent AI researchers, including Peter Norvig and Cresta co-founder Tim Shi. Together, they’re working to create a recursively self-improving AI model, one that can autonomously identify its own weaknesses and redesign itself to fix them, without human involvement — a long-held holy grail of contemporary AI research.