Trend Tuesday: The Paper-Airplane Loop of AI Research

Art by @basilonmypizza: https://lnkd.in/eF8FkWzN - https://basilhefti.ch/

As a kid, I loved making paper airplanes. You fold. You throw. You adjust. Let’s add a flap. Adjust the wings and try again. Eventually, a good airplane results.

This “paper plane loop” works in AI as well. We have seen for a while that modern AI can write software. It can generate code and find weaknesses and bugs. Now, Anthropic demonstrates how model-driven systems can propose research ideas, test them, compare results, and improve methods.

This has significant implications.

First, the already fast development cycle accelerates further.

Second, supervision becomes harder.

With a paper airplane, you can still see every fold. With automated research loops, many folds may happen unnoticed.

The business question thus is: have we covered all relevant angles? As research loops accelerate, we need to double down on evaluation, experiment tracking, and clear accountability.

The need for a strong harness increases if trust is to remain.

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• Art: https://lnkd.in/eF8FkWzN https://basilhefti.ch/

• See also Theory Thursday: A New Phase of Model Development, https://lnkd.in/eZX_heKF)

• Inside the Mind of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, https://lnkd.in/eJTrcmE4

• You may have noticed that my last post appeared on Thursday and was wrongly labeled Trend Tuesday. It seems the current temperatures affected my editorial process. On the positive side: a small hint that I do the edits myself.