Import AI 476: Creativity and RSI; worse-than-China open weight models; AI goes to space

Results: “The experimental research taste of frontier models has doubled every 3.0 months since December 2025 (95% CI 1.7-5.0 months). The best model, Opus 5.5, significantly exceeds our human baseline with a compute multiplier of 2.30x (95% CI 1.15-4.37x), at roughly 1/30 of our expert baseliners’ average cost per attempt.” Research taste appeared to grow a lot more slowly in prior years with the slope changing around the end of 2025 and beginning of 2026.

Why this matters – RSI: In my analysis of recursive self-improvement ( AI Systems Are About To Start Building Themselves, Import AI 455 ), I repeatedly noted that creativity seemed like a key variable for how fast AI systems could develop the capacity to improve themselves. At the beginning of this year I said “AI systems haven’t yet displayed this [creativity] in a transformative and major way (though some of the results on accelerating math research are suggestive of this)”. I think subsequent to writing that we’ve seen both a tremendous advancement in the ability for AI systems to make creative-seeming math breakthroughs, and with benchmarks like this we see some signs they’re becoming increasingly good at AI research as well. I now think it’s more likely we’ll see full RSI become possible in 2027, whereas before I thought it was more likely in 2028. Read more: Introducing TasteVal (P-Zero Research) .