Stephen Downes

I spent yesterday working with Claude to transfer my newsletter functions to Amazon SES, something that would have taken a week in the past, if it were possible at all (there were some very tricky bits involving signature validation and depreciated Perl crypto modules). For the record, it was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot (though Amazon's user interface is still an impenetrable wall of confusion to me). So when Ethan Mollick talks about how much AI models have improved over the last few weeks, I believe him. He outlines AI's performance on various tests and standards and describes The Software Factory, a system that takes human specifications and outputs functioning code, no human code review required. "AI companies are telling us, fairly explicitly, what comes next: recursive self-improvement, or RSI. This is the idea that AI systems are increasingly being used to build better AI systems."