Richard Socher Launches Recursive to Pursue AI Self-Improvement

Natural language processing pioneer Richard Socher announced Recursive, a new $5 billion startup spun out to focus on recursive self-improvement (RSI) for artificial intelligence. The venture was featured in an interview on the Latent Space podcast discussing the technical approach to building self-improving AI models. Recursive self-improvement is considered a critical path toward artificial general intelligence, as it allows AI models to autonomously refine their own reasoning and capabilities. Having one of the world's most cited NLP researchers lead a heavily capitalized effort in this area could significantly accelerate progress toward autonomous AI engineering. Socher, who previously founded You.com and served as Chief Scientist at Salesforce, brings over 240,000 academic citations in deep learning and NLP to the project. The venture aims to move beyond bounded self-refinement toward open-ended recursive improvement in model code and architecture.