"Partnering with AWS gives us the infrastructure to run self-improving AI research at a scale very few teams in the world are capable of," said Richard Socher, CEO and co-founder of Recursive. "We've already shown our automated AI research system can outperform years of human optimization. As our research loops run autonomously, that advantage will compound. We’re excited to partner with AWS and make our system and its infrastructure the fastest at invention generation."
Recursive is focused on building AI systems that conduct experiments to safely improve their own capabilities through an ongoing process of automated scientific discovery. The company emerged from stealth in May with a $4.65 billion valuation following funding led by GV and Greycroft, with participation from AMD Ventures and NVIDIA.
According to the company, its founding team includes former research leaders from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Salesforce AI, and Uber AI. Their backgrounds span areas including natural language processing, robotics, computer vision, reinforcement learning, systems research, and open-ended AI.
Recursive said its first public results showed its automated AI research system surpassing a two-year human leaderboard record while outperforming a live collaborative human-AI effort. The company reported new state-of-the-art results across the NanoChat, NanoGPT Speedrun, and SOL-ExecBench benchmarks.
The compute agreement represents a significant investment in infrastructure rather than headcount. Speaking to TechCrunch, Socher said the company expects similar commitments to follow as its research scales.
"For us, it’s less about headcount and more about agent count," Socher said.
He also described the AWS partnership as an early step in a broader expansion of the company's computing capacity, saying the newly announced agreement is "likely going to be one of the smallest compute deals we’re going to sign in the next few years."
AWS said Recursive's approach requires rapidly increasing computing resources because each research cycle generates additional experiments. Jason Bennett, AWS vice president and global head of startups and venture capital, said the cloud provider will supply the scale needed to support those workloads while collaborating with Recursive on specialized infrastructure.
"Self-improving AI creates a compounding demand for compute — every research loop generates the next experiment. In just a few months, Recursive has produced results that outpaced years of community-driven optimization," Bennett said. "AWS gives them the elasticity to run those loops in parallel at massive scale, and the reliability, security, and purpose-built compute to turn months of sequential research into days of parallel discovery."
Unlike some partnerships between major cloud providers and AI companies, the agreement does not include an investment from Amazon. Bennett said the companies will instead focus on building infrastructure designed for organizations developing self-improving AI systems.
Recursive said it also plans to begin introducing products built on its technology in the coming months. "We are excited to build like really amazing products that people can use, and you will see those within a few months, not within a few quarters or years," Socher told TechCrunch. "In October or so, you’ll see some actually tangible, useful things that you’ll be able to play around with."
Looking ahead, Socher said Recursive's long-term objective is to automate scientific discovery by enabling AI systems to continually improve themselves.
"Recursive self-improving AI represents one of the biggest shifts ahead for humanity. The clearest path to superintelligence is to build AI that recursively improves itself. AI is code, and AI can code. If we can close that loop properly, we can automate the scientific method itself — the same process that has driven humanity's progress in discovery and invention for centuries. That is what we're building toward at Recursive, starting with AI research itself, and partnering with AWS is how we get the infrastructure to do it at scale."
This analysis is based on reporting from TechCrunch and Amazon.
Image courtesy of Recursive.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
