Google DeepMind Exec Says Unprecedented Capex Is Actually a Bet On ‘RSI’

Over the weekend, Jasjeet Sekhon, the chief strategy officer at Google’s DeepMind AI unit, used two words to describe what needs to happen to justify his industry’s unprecedented capital expenditures: recursive self-improvement. The white-hot term refers to AI that can automatically create better versions of itself.

RSI is a “key part of the investment thesis,” Sekhon said at the Agentic AI Summit, which took place at the University of California-Berkeley.

RSI is the new AGI (artificial general intelligence) in the sense that it’s all anyone in the field is talking about as the industry’s next goalpost. Whether RSI would precede or coincide with AGI—AI that is better than humans at most economically valuable tasks—is an entirely different conversation!

To be fair to Sekhon, RSI has been an industry goal for some time. I first started hearing the term from researchers in early 2023. But it wasn’t part of corporations’ public rhetoric until recent weeks.