Video · Everlast AI ·
It Begins: AI Is Now Improving Itself

This Everlast AI video by Leonard discusses AI recursive self-improvement. A 23-year-old DeepSeek researcher, identified as Leo Sheng You / Liu Shengyu, an alumnus of Peking University's Turing class since April 2025, published a roughly 3000-character essay titled 'Ich muss mein Talent im gestern begraben' that reached #1 on the largest Chinese knowledge platform within 48 hours. He writes 'kernels' - programs executed billions of times when a model answers - previously this role belonged to DeepSeek V4.1's attention cell. He predicts that within a year the kernels an AI writes will be as good as or surpass his own. The video cites that Claude at Anthropic now independently leads 26% of its own AI research (under 1% in February), that at OpenAI 3.1 agent workdays occur per human workday and that since June agent compute time exceeds human work time, and that Serge Brin directs over 1000 researchers at Google on this 'kernel'. Dario Amodei reportedly demanded a speed limit for this ability on September 12, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreeing publicly the same day. Jürgen Schmidhuber, called the father of AI by the New York Times, traces self-improvement algorithms to his 1987 thesis. Recursive self-improvement means a system can examine and replace its own learning method. Google DeepMind describes four types: code, hardware (chips), data, and more. OpenAI's first own inference chip, Jalapeno, was completed in about 9 months with help from an internal model. The video uses
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Each tool opens in the Heidelberg AI Curriculum: what it does, what it costs, how to start.



