AI Improves at Improving Itself Using an Evolutionary Trick
IEEE Spectrum - AI
Jun 26, 2025 13:00
Matthew Hutson
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Summary
New research demonstrates AI systems that can recursively improve their own coding abilities using evolutionary techniques, marking a significant step toward self-improving AI. Major tech companies like Microsoft and Google already rely heavily on AI-generated code, and this advancement could greatly boost productivity but also raises concerns about potential risks. Experts note that while the concept isn’t new, recent technological progress is making self-improving AI a practical reality, with profound implications for the future of software development and AI safety.
In April, Microsoft’s CEO said that artificial intelligence now wrote close to a third of the company’s code. Last October, Google’s CEO put their number at around a quarter. Other tech companies can’t be far off. Meanwhile, these firms create AI that will presumably be used to help programmers further. Researchers have long hoped to fully close the loop, creating coding agents that recursively improve themselves. New research reveals an impressive demonstration of such a system. Extrapolating, one might see a boon to productivity, or a much darker future for humanity. “It’s nice work,” said Jürgen Schmidhuber, a computer scientist at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), in Saudi Arabia, who was not involved in the new research. “I think for many people, the results are surprising. Since I’ve been working on that topic for almost 40 years now, it’s maybe a little bit less surprising to me.” But his work over that time was limited by the tech at hand. One new