Jack Clark Profile picture
May 4 6 tweets 2 min read Read on X
I've spent the past few weeks reading 100s of public data sources about AI development. I now believe that recursive self-improvement has a 60% chance of happening by the end of 2028. In other words, AI systems might soon be capable of building themselves.
Major essay in Import AI 455, just published online. Image
A lot of the conclusion comes from assembling a mosaic out of many distinct data sources. Some examples - progress on CORE-Bench, where the task is implementing other research papers (huge amounts of AI research comes from interpreting and replicating results) Image
Another nice example is PostTrainBench from @karinanguyen et al, where you need to autonomously have powerful models (e.g, Opus 4.6) finetune weaker open weight models to improve perf on some benchmarks. This is an important subset of the overall task of AI R&D. Image
@karinanguyen There's also MLE-Bench, which is ecologically valid (tasks come from real kaggle competitions) and involves building a very diverse set of ML apps to solve specific problems. The same progress shows up here. Image
@karinanguyen My whole experience doing this project was finding endless "up and to the right" graphs at all resolutions of AI R&D, from the well known (e.g., SWE-Bench) to more niche (like those above). It's a fractal, but at all the resolutions you see the same trend of meaningful progress.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Jack Clark

Jack Clark Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @jackclarkSF

Jun 13, 2025
Inside baseball policy thread: Last night, NY passed the RAISE act, which would establish some transparency requirements for frontier models. We @anthropicai haven’t taken a position on this bill. But I thought it’d be helpful to give some more context:
We’ve given some feedback to this bill, like we do with many bills both at federal and state level. Despite improvements, we continue to have some concerns which I’ll lay out here:
- RAISE is overly broad/unclear in some of its key definitions which makes it difficult to know how to comply
- If the state believes there is a compliance deficiency in a lab’s safety plan, it’s not clear you’d get an opportunity to correct it before enforcement kicks in
Read 8 tweets
Nov 9, 2024
AI skeptics: LLMs are copy-paste engines, incapable of original thought, basically worthless.

Professionals who track AI progress: We've worked with 60 mathematicians to build a hard test that modern systems get 2% on. Hope this benchmark lasts more than a couple of years. Image
I think if people who are true LLM skeptics spent 10 hours trying to get modern AI systems to do tasks that the skeptics are experts in they'd be genuinely shocked by how capable these things are.
There is a kind of tragedy in all of this - many people who are skeptical of LLMs are also people who think deeply about the political economy of AI. I think they could be more effective in their political advocacy if they were truly calibrated as to the state of progress.
Read 4 tweets
Oct 3, 2024
Extremely short thread about being very scared: This week, my plane from LHR to SFO had an electrical issue. All the lights in the plane turned off and there was a smell of burning plastic. We did an emergency landing in Calgary.
The experience was notable - I thought I might be in serious trouble, given the fact there was a strong smell of smoke in the airplane cabin (bad), the pilots suddenly announcing we'd be landing within 15 minutes (very bad), and did I mention the SMELL OF SMOKE IN THE AIRCRAFT?
I listened to music and closed my eyes while the plane headed towards Calgary. I felt very emotional. At some point I got cell service and was able to call my spouse and she put me on speaker phone so I could chat with the (simglish-only) baby. I was pretty measured.
Read 7 tweets
Jun 25, 2023
Will write something longer, but if best ideas for AI policy involve depriving people of the 'means of production' of AI (e.g H100s), then you don't have a hugely viable policy. (I 100% am not criticizing @Simeon_Cps here; his tweet highlights how difficult the situation is).
I gave a slide preso back in fall of 2022 along these lines. Including some slides here. The gist of it is if you basically go after compute in the wrong ways you annoy a huge amount of people and you guarantee pushback and differential tech development.



Since I gave that presentation we've seen:
- people build chatGPT clone models by training on chatGPT outputs
- low-cost finetuning like LORA / QLORA etc
- increase in number of actors trying to do open/decentralized model development (e.g )
- etctogether.xyz
Read 22 tweets
Feb 12, 2023
A mental model I have of AI is it was roughly ~linear progress from 1960s-2010, then exponential 2010-2020s, then has started to display 'compounding exponential' properties in 2021/22 onwards. In other words, next few years will yield progress that intuitively feels nuts.
There's pretty good evidence for the extreme part of my claim - recently, language models got good enough we can build new datasets out of LM outputs and train LMs on them and get better performance rather than worse performance. E.g, this Google paper: arxiv.org/abs/2210.11610
We can also train these models to improve their capabilities through use of tools (e.g, calculators, QA systems), as in the just-came-out 'Toolformer' paper arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761 .
Another fav of mine= this wild paper where they staple MuJoCo to an LM arxiv.org/abs/2210.05359
Read 5 tweets
Jan 29, 2023
Modern AI development highlights the tragedy of letting the private sector lead AI invention - the future is here but it's mostly inaccessible due to corporations afraid of PR&Policy risks. (This thought sparked by Google not releasing its music models, but trend is general). The 21st century is being d...
There will of course be exceptions and some companies will release stuff. But this isn't going to get us many of the benefits of the magic of contemporary AI. We're surrendering our own culture and our identity to the logic of markets. I am aghast at this. And you should be too.
I've written a lot about this in Import AI 316 (which comes out tomorrow), as well as a short story about what commercially-led data gathering leads us to. The gates of heaven and hell are open, to paraphrase someone else who works in AI.
Read 5 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(