AI agents can't yet do open-ended AI research
AI agents can't yet do open-ended AI researchEarly evidence from two case studiesSayash Kapoor and Arvind NarayananAug 05, 20264324ShareThe goal of leading AI labs is recursive self-improvement (RSI): the automation of AI research using AI agents. RSI also underpins forecasts of explosive AI progress. How can we assess if we are close to this milestone?One way is to use benchmarks that test if agents can conduct AI research.
- ▪AI agents can't yet do open-ended AI researchEarly evidence from two case studiesSayash Kapoor and Arvind NarayananAug 05, 20264324ShareThe goal of leading AI labs is recursive self-improvement (RSI): the automation of AI research using AI
- ▪RSI also underpins forecasts of explosive AI progress.
- ▪How can we assess if we are close to this milestone?One way is to use benchmarks that test if agents can conduct AI research.
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Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (AI / LLM) |
| Canonical URL | https://www.normaltech.ai/p/ai-agents-cant-yet-do-open-ended |
| Publication time | Wed, 05 Aug 2026 15:31:53 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-05T15:35:41.796Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-05T15:35:41.796Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Tr2_6iOeJZSB · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AI agents can't yet do open-ended AI researchEarly evidence from two case studiesSayash Kapoor and Arvind NarayananAug 05, 20264324ShareThe goal of leading AI labs is recursive self-improvement (RSI): the automation of AI research using AI agents. RSI also underpins forecasts of explosive AI progress. How can we assess if we are close to this milestone?One way is to use benchmarks that test if agents can conduct AI research. Given the AI community’s focus on benchmarks, they have been the dominant way to evaluate progress towards RSI.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (AI / LLM).
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