a16z's Martin Casado with http://MakerMaker.AI CTO Owen He on why a lot of RSI pitches are selling something as old as the steam engine: Martin: "I see a lot of pitches come in, and a lot of them use the term RSI. And I'll be like, 'Oh, so what do you do?' And they'll say, 'We use AI to create AI.' 'That sounds very interesting. So what do you do?' 'We use AI to create GPU kernels.'" Owen: "RSI is definitely an overloaded term today... The important thing when you are differentiating them is to ask the question, what is the optimizer and what is the optimizee? When you're self-improving, who is improving?" "There are people who are saying, 'Okay, we're doing RSI. We have humans using AI to develop better AI.' But that to us is just autocatalysis... the ideas and the improvement come from human brains." Martin: "Most technical epochs have had autocatalytic effects. There's no way you can create a computer chip without a computer... You could build better steam engines because you could get coal faster, etc. So this notion of using the thing to build the thing faster is not new." Owen: "That human brain was never the optimizee. Now, for the first time, we could swap the optimizer as the optimizee... The brain of the agents, which is the LLM, the model, can be the thing that you're optimizing, and this leads to this reinvestment of cognitive improvement into itself." @makermaker_ai @martin_casado