Zvi's Mic Works! Recursive Self-Improvement, Live Player Analysis, Anthropic vs DoW + More!

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm excited to welcome Zvi Mowshowitz, author of the indispensable sub-stack, Don't Worry About the Base, back for his record 12th appearance on the podcast. Whenever I get the chance to catch up with Zvi, I try to get his take on all of the most important recent developments in AI. And with so much going on, this episode stretches to more than three hours. We start with the critical question of recursive self-improvement. Zvi explains why he thinks that recent events mark a transition from the beginning to the middle of the AI story, as well as what he would need to see to feel that we've entered the AI endgame. Namely, that AIs begin driving AI advances to the point that human research talent no longer matters. From there, we discuss the rising narrative of AI-related job loss. I ask Zvi to estimate the productivity impact that AI is already having on the economy. And we discuss the bankrupt ethics of focusing one's energy on escaping the so-called permanent underclass, which we both see as flagrant defection, and Zvi colorfully argues won't work anyway. After that, we consider the AI live players. The list, we agree, seems to have shrunk to just three companies, with Anthropic probably slightly leading, OpenAI still neck and neck, and Google, in Zvi's mind, most at risk of falling out of the top tier. Zvi also explains why he thinks that Chinese companies won't soon catch up, even if they do get an influx of compute, and explores what XAI and Meta might possibly do to get back into the race. From there, we dig into Anthropic's recent update to their Responsible Scaling Policy, consider their conflict with the Department of War, and we get Zvi's take on the efficacy of the constitutional approach, and whether it's realistic to expect that a powerful AI could be robustly good. Toward the end, we check in on his current Pdome number, compare notes on how we're each using AI to boost our personal productivity, briefly debate the merits of Goodfire's intentional design research agenda, assess the AI safety community's currently available options, and I get some personal, financial, and professional advice. For a mix of broad situational awareness and razor-sharp insight, there is arguably nobody better. And so, I hope you enjoy this wide-ranging survey of the AI state of play, with the one and only Zvi Mowshowitz.
Zvi Mowshowitz, welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Zvi Mowshowitz** (2:28)
Good to be back. It's been a while.

**Nathan Labenz** (2:30)
It has. I've been busy, and so has the rest of the world, and we've got no shortage of major events from the AI world to cover.

**Zvi Mowshowitz** (2:39)
Oh, boy.

**Nathan Labenz** (2:41)
I know you've been busy, too. Let's start with recursive self-improvement. I think if there are any historians around in the distant future, which could be as short as a few decades from now, to look back on this time and say what really mattered in early 2026, probably my best guess is that we are in the period where we're really starting to enter into a recursive self-improvement dynamic from which there may already be no return, or that we may soon reach a point of no return. I feel like subjectively, we kind of went from late early, you know, it was like getting to the end of the beginning. And now suddenly, I feel like we're maybe in the beginning of the end. And I feel like somehow we missed the middle. But let's start with just your reflections and observations on where we are with respect to recursive self-improvement.

**Zvi Mowshowitz** (3:36)
Yeah, so we're in the beginnings of steadily increasing amounts of the health improvement. I would say this feels like the middle. I think the middle is real.
I don't think you... I think that the reason why people think of this as the end game is because they don't believe in the actual end game. They have this belief that we're looking at an S-curve. They believe the models will be commoditized. They believe that intelligence will be commoditized. They believe that the future will look like the past, except with all of this cool intelligence behind everything. But in the way that Star Trek is basically just modern humanity doing modern human things and talking about modern human issues except with metaphors. And they don't really believe that everything will transform, that everything will change because everything is not transforming yet. If I had to use the metaphor at the beginning and the end, I'd say this is the beginning of the middle game. You've got the US government starting to wake up and do crazy stuff. You've got the labs starting to pull away from each other, become importantly different, offer importantly recognized and different services, building on themselves in ways that are rockets to the moon in various different ways. That you've got, frankly, like, humans stop writing the code and, you know, you're seeing cycles get faster and faster. But you aren't seeing true transformational changes to the world. You aren't seeing the humans being legitimately out of control of the process. You aren't seeing humans out of the loop. And those are the types of things I would think would count before I would call it an endgame.