Chinese researchers chart 5-stage path toward ‘last AI built by humans’
Por Minxiao Chang — South China Morning Post – News feed
Advertisement Artificial intelligence Tech Tech Trends Chinese researchers chart 5-stage path toward ‘last AI built by humans’
Automating AI research has emerged as a battleground, though US firms have an early lead due to superior access to compute resources
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Minxiao Chang in Shenzhen Published: 9:30pm, 14 Sep 2026 Updated: 9:31pm, 14 Sep 2026
Researchers from China’s leading universities and tech giants are setting their sights on a crucial new front in the AI race with the US: developing systems capable of building better versions of themselves without human intervention.
In a joint paper published on Thursday, researchers from ByteDance, Tsinghua University and the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, among others, outlined a five-stage road map for recursive self-improvement (RSI).
The study, titled “The Last AI Built by Humans: Toward Genuine Recursive Self-Improvement”, highlights a growing industry focus on automating the labour-intensive life cycle of training, evaluating, and fine-tuning AI models.
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