{"slug": "why-former-deepmind-engineers-are-targeting-rsi", "title": "Why former DeepMind engineers are targeting RSI", "summary": "Ian Fischer and Shumeet Baluja, former engineers at Google DeepMind, have founded Poetiq, a company focused on recursive self-improvement (RSI) technology built on existing language models, and on Monday they debuted Augur, a benchmarking system that helps enterprises compare model performance. Fischer stated that good RSI systems could accelerate progress toward superintelligence, but Poetiq keeps its RSI technology internal, as they believe it could become dangerous if widely distributed.", "body_md": "Ian Fischer and Shumeet Baluja left Google DeepMind to focus on one specific goal: Recursive Self-Improvement.\n\nSelf-improving AI has come sharply into focus in recent months as the industry unveils evidence that AI is reaching a point where research could be automated. Though some in the industry have [raised their concerns](https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/anthropic-s-rsi-warning-contrasts-with-ipo-filing) about automated development, Baluja and Fischer think they can do it safely.\n\nThey are the founders of Poetiq, a company that builds recursive self-improvement technology on top of existing language models. It does this using what Fischer calls \"self-optimizing optimizers,\" or optimization harnesses for models that are built specifically to improve themselves at certain tasks. To put it simply, rather than continually self-improving the base models they are built on, these harnesses, which sit outside of the LLMs, are only improving themselves on narrowly-scoped tasks.\n\n\"If you think that superintelligence is something we should be trying to get to quickly, then RSI is the most important frontier in AI research,\" Fischer told The Deep View. \"Good RSI systems can get us to superintelligence much faster than the standard approach where human researchers are trying to manually figure out how to make the AI better.\"\n\nAnd on Monday, the company debuted Augur, a system that helps enterprises and researchers reveal exactly which model is the right fit for any given task, whether it be open-source or proprietary, using customized, domain-specific benchmarks to quantitatively compare model performance. This is particularly useful for enterprises trying to balance cost and performance, or developers that want to fine-tune a model and need to know where that model is lacking.\n\nSo why is Poetiq focusing on benchmarking? Fischer said that Augur has been a core tool in helping build out the company's RSI system.\n\n- Baluja said that they came up with the idea for Augur through the company's RSI research: By building intelligence outside of the models, they came to the realization that each model has very different attributes in terms of where it may perform better.\n- In order to figure out where it needs to optimize, its RSI system had already been scanning over frontier and open-source models to create implicit maps automatically of where they performed exceptionally well.\n- \"We realized, if this is implicitly doing this, wouldn't it be kind of cool to make this an explicit product?\" said Baluja. \"It was a pretty natural extension that just came straight out of our RSI work.\"\n\n\"If you have an RSI system, it's constantly requiring more data to understand where the frontiers are for each model,\" Baluja added. \"So this naturally became a system that feeds back into our whole RSI system for expanding the boundaries of what models know.\"\n\nStill, Poetiq is navigating a very contentious field. Many have called into question the risks, such as Anthropic's Dario Amodei and a coalition of more than 1,200 researchers in a campaign called [Pacing the Frontier](https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/why-the-experts-building-ai-want-to-slow-it-down), claiming that the tech could grow beyond our ability to control or understand it.\n\nIt's why Poetiq doesn't sell its RSI technology outright, said Fischer: \"This is internal only, and that's quite intentional. We think that this is the thing that could become dangerous, and we don't want to let just anybody have it.\"\n\n## Our Deeper *View*\n\nPoetiq is one of many companies driven by the core idea that superintelligence is a goal to strive for. It's the ideal that lays at the foundation of heavyweights like OpenAI and Anthropic, and the key to the AI utopia that industry leaders have preached about in an effort to garner support for their trillion-dollar valuations. However, Poetiq's own systems may provide an example as to why superintelligence isn't actually necessary: By benchmarking for specific skills and implementing the RSI systems for specific tasks, it allows models to be fine-tuned for specific purposes, rather than creating a general purpose model that can do everything under the sun. Additionally, because Augur allows enterprises to strike the balance between cost and efficiency, the tool helps companies get exactly the right amount of capability, instead of using a hammer to kill a fly.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/why-former-deepmind-engineers-are-targeting-rsi", "canonical_source": "https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/why-former-deepmind-engineers-are-targeting-rsi", "published_at": "2026-08-10 11:30:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-10 12:52:42.915523+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-research", "ai-products", "ai-safety"], "entities": ["Ian Fischer", "Shumeet Baluja", "Google DeepMind", "Poetiq", "Augur", "Anthropic", "Dario Amodei"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/why-former-deepmind-engineers-are-targeting-rsi", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/why-former-deepmind-engineers-are-targeting-rsi.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/why-former-deepmind-engineers-are-targeting-rsi.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/why-former-deepmind-engineers-are-targeting-rsi.jsonld"}}