--- schema: 1 type: video title: 'First Steps Toward Automated AI Research — Richard Socher, CEO Recursive AI' description: >- Humanity compressed the road from the enlightenment to the moon landing into a few hundred years, and Richard Socher's wager is that automating research compresses it again. He frames it through open ended evolution and Popper: science advances by trying things, finding the shortcomings, and fixing them, and an agent swarm can run that loop across medicine, economics, astrophysics, and more without any single person bottlenecking a field. He calls the goal a Eureka machine, and argues that rethinking the tools around it, web search that returns usable context instead of ten blue links, browsers, and GPUs, is part of building it. The proof points are recursive self improvement, where a system improves its own code, harness, and results and then does it again over longer horizons. He shows small but concrete wins: an automated loop that lifts a model's accuracy well past a naive baseline, architecture search that trades hand tuning for a system that finds better designs, and CUDA kernel work that surfaced real improvements. He is careful that these are early samples, not a finished machine, and that the field is far from general across all of science, but the direction is the point, and he ends with an open invitation to help build it. Speaker info: - https://x.com/RichardSocher - https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardsocher - https://you.com Timestamps: 0:00 - Automating research for humanity 1:41 - Why this matters now 2:19 - Compressing the timeline of progress 4:28 - Technoptimism and material limits 6:22 - Popper and open ended evolution 9:07 - The Eureka machine 10:39 - Rethinking search, browsers, and GPUs 13:41 - Recursive self improvement 14:46 - Proof point: improving a model 16:39 - Proof point: architecture search 17:16 - Proof point: CUDA kernels 19:11 - How far we still are, and an invitation --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/pWXUkLP9uWM-first-steps-toward-automated-ai-research Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- canonical: >- https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/first-steps-toward-automated-ai-research-richard-so-3aad8163a379 markdown: >- https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/video/first-steps-toward-automated-ai-research-richard-so-3aad8163a379.md llms: null parent: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md' channel: aidotengineer updated: '2026-10-24T06:29:37.540Z' language: null children: [] videoId: pWXUkLP9uWM durationSeconds: 1224 publishedAt: '2026-07-30T16:59:37.000Z' searchChunks: - ordinal: 0 text: null startSeconds: 22 endSeconds: 111 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=22' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 1 text: null startSeconds: 122 endSeconds: 144 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=122' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 2 text: null startSeconds: 157 endSeconds: 278 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=157' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 3 text: null startSeconds: 278 endSeconds: 288 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=278' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 4 text: null startSeconds: 288 endSeconds: 390 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=288' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 5 text: null startSeconds: 400 endSeconds: 555 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=400' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 6 text: null startSeconds: 400 endSeconds: 555 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=400' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 7 text: null startSeconds: 565 endSeconds: 641 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=565' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 8 text: null startSeconds: 565 endSeconds: 641 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=565' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 9 text: null startSeconds: 652 endSeconds: 829 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=652' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 10 text: null startSeconds: 652 endSeconds: 829 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=652' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 11 text: null startSeconds: 652 endSeconds: 829 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=652' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 12 text: null startSeconds: 829 endSeconds: 839 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=829' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 13 text: null startSeconds: 839 endSeconds: 892 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=839' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 14 text: null startSeconds: 902 endSeconds: 1002 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=902' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 15 text: null startSeconds: 902 endSeconds: 1002 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=902' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 16 text: null startSeconds: 1013 endSeconds: 1036 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=1013' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 17 text: null startSeconds: 1046 endSeconds: 1156 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=1046' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 18 text: null startSeconds: 1046 endSeconds: 1156 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=1046' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 19 text: null startSeconds: 1046 endSeconds: 1156 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=1046' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 20 text: null startSeconds: 1168 endSeconds: 1224 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/pWXUkLP9uWM?t=1168' heldReason: rights --- # First Steps Toward Automated AI Research — Richard Socher, CEO Recursive AI Humanity compressed the road from the enlightenment to the moon landing into a few hundred years, and Richard Socher's wager is that automating research compresses it again. He frames it through open ended evolution and Popper: science advances by trying things, finding the shortcomings, and fixing them, and an agent swarm can run that loop across medicine, economics, astrophysics, and more without any single person bottlenecking a field. He calls the goal a Eureka machine, and argues that rethinking the tools around it, web search that returns usable context instead of ten blue links, browsers, and GPUs, is part of building it. The proof points are recursive self improvement, where a system improves its own code, harness, and results and then does it again over longer horizons. He shows small but concrete wins: an automated loop that lifts a model's accuracy well past a naive baseline, architecture search that trades hand tuning for a system that finds better designs, and CUDA kernel work that surfaced real improvements. He is careful that these are early samples, not a finished machine, and that the field is far from general across all of science, but the direction is the point, and he ends with an open invitation to help build it. Speaker info: - https://x.com/RichardSocher - https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardsocher - https://you.com Timestamps: 0:00 - Automating research for humanity 1:41 - Why this matters now 2:19 - Compressing the timeline of progress 4:28 - Technoptimism and material limits 6:22 - Popper and open ended evolution 9:07 - The Eureka machine 10:39 - Rethinking search, browsers, and GPUs 13:41 - Recursive self improvement 14:46 - Proof point: improving a model 16:39 - Proof point: architecture search 17:16 - Proof point: CUDA kernels 19:11 - How far we still are, and an invitation --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/pWXUkLP9uWM-first-steps-toward-automated-ai-research Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- Canonical: https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/first-steps-toward-automated-ai-research-richard-so-3aad8163a379 · Channel: [AI Engineer](https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md) > Search chunk text is held until public-source provenance is verified. ## Document chunks > Missing: no stored document chunks are available.