Chinese Researchers Publish 75-Page Roadmap to Recursive Self-Improvement
A team of 33 Chinese researchers has published “The Last AI Built by Humans”, a 75-page paper proposing a formal roadmap toward Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) — systems that improve not only their capabilities but the process of improvement itself. The authors define five levels of autonomy: from AI executing human-designed improvements, to selecting improvement strategies independently, to gathering new experience autonomously, to adapting to new environments, and finally to recursive meta-improvement where the system refines its own learning mechanism. The paper also introduces the Headroom-Closed Index (HCI) for measuring how close existing LLMs are to performance ceilings on specific tasks. The work examines RSI across software engineering, scientific research, and embodied AI, linking the concept to existing systems and early experiments. The authors frame this not as a demonstration of superintelligence but as an attempt to formalize the path from current AI agents to systems that can conduct an increasing share of their own R&D.
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