Yuandong Tian on Recursive Self-Improvement

The Information Bottleneck · Oct 5, 2026 · 58m · transcript

Yuandong Tian spent many years at Meta FAIR and recently left to co-found Recursive Superintelligence, a company building AI that improves itself. In this episode, he tells us why.

We start with his work on computer Go, where he built DarkForest before AlphaGo came out. A few years later came OpenGo, which played Korean professionals on a single GPU and didn't lose a game. He then tried to bring RL to real-world problems and found that the design of the action space mattered more than the algorithm.

We also talk about Coconut, his paper on reasoning in latent space instead of tokens, and why…