---
title: "Recursive self-improvement — AI hype score and trend · Above the Fog"
canonical_url: https://abovethefog.app/topics/recursive_self_improvement
as_of: 2026-09-27
updated: 2026-09-28T22:02:40Z
---

# Recursive self-improvement (💡 Concepts)

[Home](https://abovethefog.app/index.md) › [Topics](https://abovethefog.app/topics.md) › Recursive self-improvement

Recursive self-improvement is 💤 Quiet on Above the Fog’s AI hype radar: a hype score of 17 out of 100 on Sep 27, 2026, 2 points lower than 7 days before. Its attention is within the normal range across the monitored sources. Its last hype episode in the 30-day window ran from Sep 9 to Sep 18 (peak 61 on Sep 14).

AIs that create or train their successors; a central theme of the Sep 2026 debate (Amodei's essay, Hinton calling for a ban, researchers resigning).

First seen on Google News (RSS) · Sep 13 — the first monitored source to go above normal for it in the last 14 days.

Why this stage: within the normal range across monitored sources.

- **Stage:** 💤 Quiet — within the normal range across the monitored sources
- **Hype score:** 16.8 / 100 · +2.8 in 1 day · −2.5 in 7 days
- **In hype since:** not in hype now
- **Peak, 30 days:** 61.3 on Sep 14, 2026
- **Category:** 💡 Concepts
- **Sources above normal:** 1 of 24 scoring it (1 independent family)
- **Stories in 7 days:** 64
- **Share of voice:** 0.2% of the radar’s attention in 7 days

## Where the attention comes from

“Normal” is the median of the source’s previous 14 normal days for this topic. A source is above normal when its value is at least 30% over that level and stands out from its usual day-to-day variation (z ≥ 2); the share is the part of the hype score that source explains. “× normal” is left blank when the normal level is 0.

| Source | Metric | Latest | Normal | × normal | Above normal | Share of score |
|---|---|---:|---:|---:|---|---:|
| Wikipedia | pageviews | 880 | 307 | 2.9× | yes | 91% |
| Mastodon (fediverse) | tag uses | 4 | 1 | 2.5× | no | 9.2% |
| Bluesky | trending | 0 (Sep 26) | 0 | — | no | 0% |
| Developer forums (Cursor, OpenAI, Hugging Face) | items | 0 | 0 | — | no | 0% |
| GitHub | new repos | 4 (Sep 26) | 4 | 1× | no | 0% |
| GitHub Trending | trending | 0 (Sep 26) | 0 | — | no | 0% |
| Google Trends (Trending now) | trending | 0 (Sep 26) | 0 | — | no | 0% |
| Hugging Face Daily Papers | items | 0 | 0 | — | no | 0% |

## Stories behind it

1. [Elon Musk: xAI Will Keep Accelerating And Will Surpass Anthropic And OpenAI Within 6 Months](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1wp9xji/) — Reddit (r/singularity) · Sep 24 · score 371 · 510 comments
2. [RRSI: Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnesses](https://huggingface.co/papers/2609.24972) — Hugging Face Daily Papers (hf-papers) · Sep 22 · score 210 · 2 comments
3. [AI #187: Coming Into Play](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-187-coming-into-play) — AI newsletters (RSS) (Zvi) · Sep 24 · score 56 · 39 comments
4. [Learning about recursive self-improvement — looking for feedback on my experimental framework](https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/learning-about-recursive-self-improvement-looking-for-feedback-on-my-experimental-framework/180689) — Developer forums (Cursor, OpenAI, Hugging Face) (Hugging Face Forums) · Sep 23 · score 5 · 2 comments
5. [Recursive self-improvement of AI research agents](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49819845) — Hacker News (arxiv.org) · Sep 23 · score 3 · 1 comment
6. [#AI #rsi #huggingface](https://mstdn.social/@GeriAQuin/117342786210388564) — Mastodon (fediverse) (mstdn.social) · Sep 27 · score 0 · 2 comments
7. [Sources: Mirendil, founded by former Anthropic researchers to build self-improving AI, is in talks to raise \~$1B led by Kleiner Perkins at a $5B valuation](https://www.techmeme.com/260922/p45#a260922p45) — Techmeme (Bloomberg) · Sep 22 · score 1 · 1 comment
8. [webscout9-png/rsi-forge: Recursive Self-Improvement Forge for Open-Source AI Models — make open models continuously smarter through bounded harness + memory RSI](https://github.com/webscout9-png/rsi-forge) — GitHub (webscout9-png) · Sep 26 · score 1
9. [Intelligence in the Open: Recursive Self-Improvement](https://partiful.com/e/DKY1zYjyuOvMf5RGzjAJ) — Cerebral Valley (AI events) (San Francisco, CA)
10. [How did they do it?](https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wpdyms/) — Reddit (r/ClaudeAI) · Sep 24 · score 528 · 123 comments
11. [Dream-RSI With All Costs Included: When Does Self-Improvement Actually Pay Off?](https://dev.to/theastraydev/dream-rsi-with-all-costs-included-when-does-self-improvement-actually-pay-off-2igk) — DEV Community (dev.to) (#ai) · Sep 24 · score 2 · 0 comments
12. [Reading an official Hugging Face leaderboard: protocols, majority vote and reproducibility](https://dev.to/ai_openfree_b23025ef075cf/reading-an-official-hugging-face-leaderboard-protocols-majority-vote-and-reproducibility-2oon) — DEV Community (dev.to) (#ai) · Sep 28 · score 0 · 1 comment

## Themes

What its stories of the last 7 days are about: the 64 of them the Jev model kept as about the scene, by theme (a story can carry several themes):

- [Models](https://abovethefog.app/themes/models.md) — 53% of its stories
- [Agents](https://abovethefog.app/themes/agents.md) — 33% of its stories
- [Policy & macro](https://abovethefog.app/themes/policy_macro.md) — 33% of its stories
- [Security & safety](https://abovethefog.app/themes/security_safety.md) — 28% of its stories
- [Protocols & infra](https://abovethefog.app/themes/protocols_infra.md) — 9.4% of its stories
- [Companies & business](https://abovethefog.app/themes/companies_business.md) — 9.4% of its stories

## Related topics

- **Related to:** [AGI - superintelligence](https://abovethefog.app/topics/agi.md), [AI in math](https://abovethefog.app/topics/ai_math.md), [AI slowdown](https://abovethefog.app/topics/ai_slowdown.md), [AI agents](https://abovethefog.app/topics/ai_agents.md)
- **Mentioned with:** [Anthropic](https://abovethefog.app/topics/anthropic.md) (60 stories), [Google DeepMind](https://abovethefog.app/topics/google_deepmind.md) (21 stories), [Dario Amodei](https://abovethefog.app/topics/dario_amodei.md) (18 stories), [Stop the AI Race protest](https://abovethefog.app/topics/stop_ai_race.md) (3 stories)

## Hype score, last 30 days

| Day | Hype score | Stage |
|---|---:|---|
| Sep 27, 2026 | 16.8 | 💤 Quiet |
| Sep 26, 2026 | 14 | 💤 Quiet |
| Sep 25, 2026 | 15 | 💤 Quiet |
| Sep 24, 2026 | 14.8 | 💤 Quiet |
| Sep 23, 2026 | 17.5 | 💤 Quiet |
| Sep 22, 2026 | 16.6 | 🧊 Cooling |
| Sep 21, 2026 | 18.4 | 🧊 Cooling |
| Sep 20, 2026 | 19.3 | 🧊 Cooling |
| Sep 19, 2026 | 17.1 | 🧊 Cooling |
| Sep 18, 2026 | 49.7 | 🔥 Hot |
| Sep 17, 2026 | 57.5 | 🔥 Hot |
| Sep 16, 2026 | 60.7 | 🚀 Rising |
| Sep 15, 2026 | 44.8 | 🔥 Hot |
| Sep 14, 2026 | 61.3 | 🚀 Rising |
| Sep 13, 2026 | 50 | 🚀 Rising |
| Sep 12, 2026 | 51.6 | 🔥 Hot |
| Sep 11, 2026 | 41.3 | 🚀 Rising |
| Sep 10, 2026 | 33.6 | 🔥 Hot |
| Sep 9, 2026 | 43.5 | 🚀 Rising |
| Sep 8, 2026 | 14.3 | 💤 Quiet |
| Sep 7, 2026 | 14.7 | 💤 Quiet |
| Sep 6, 2026 | 2.2 | 💤 Quiet |
| Sep 5, 2026 | 8.7 | 💤 Quiet |
| Sep 4, 2026 | 10.3 | 💤 Quiet |
| Sep 3, 2026 | 4.4 | 💤 Quiet |
| Sep 2, 2026 | 0.5 | 💤 Quiet |
| Sep 1, 2026 | 3.4 | 💤 Quiet |
| Aug 31, 2026 | 18.5 | 💤 Quiet |
| Aug 30, 2026 | 0 | 💤 Quiet |
| Aug 29, 2026 | 0 | 💤 Quiet |

[Open Recursive self-improvement in the interactive map →](https://abovethefog.app/#topic=recursive_self_improvement)

---

Updated Sep 28, 2026, 22:02 UTC · Data: Above the Fog hype radar

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