Monday AI Radar #23

If you pay close attention to this newsletter, you’ll notice that something is missing. Anthropic and Open AI are everywhere, but Google Deep Mind is largely absent. We have a profile of Demis Hassabis, an also-ran mention in Prinz’s review of the race to RSI, and some complaints about Gemini’s character from Will Mac Askill and Rob Wiblin. And that’s about it. GDM makes great models, but they aren’t quite keeping up with Anthropic and Open AI. Top pick. The race to RSI, spring 2026 update Prinz reviews the race to recursive self-improvement, concluding unsurprisingly that Anthropic and OpenAI are well ahead of everyone else. Even in AI circles, not enough people have paid attention to what the labs are saying about their timelines for RSI. Anthropic says they are on track to fully automate AI R&D as soon as early 2027, and OpenAI expects a fully automated AI researcher by March 2028. Will that actually happen? Research progress is hard to predict, but Anthropic has a track record of nearly meeting some milestones that seemed absurd when they were first announced. Their current projections seem ambitious but plausible, based on how fast agentic coding is improving as well as theprimitive automated AI researchers we’re already seeing. An automated AI researcher doesn’t automatically lead to a fast takeoff, of course. There are plenty of ways we could hit bottlenecks, or run into fundamental research gaps that take decades to fill in. But if the labs hit their projections over the next year or two, an imminent intelligence explosion is a very plausible scenario. New releases Opus 4.7 Opus 4.7 is a great model with some issues, especially around personality. Zvi reviews the model card, capabilities and reactions, and model welfare. The model welfare report is worth reading: there are signs that something didn’t go quite right during training. GPT-5.5 GPT 5.5 is another strong release—Ethan Mollick is impressed. OpenAI has been boring in all the right ways lately, with a suc