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Paradigm Ships a Playable Recursive Self-Improvement Simulator Built on Elasticity Economics
Justin Wang and Dan Robinson published the RSI Simulator on 2026-08-11 — a browser game where you run an AI lab allocating labor, compute and data toward superintelligence, built on the Elasticity Institute's 'The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement.' The model turns on elasticities, chiefly the elasticity of discovery rate to current model capability, and its conclusions push against the standard fast-takeoff intuition: compute and data bottlenecks bind even for superhuman researchers, acceleration is likely intermittent rather than continuous, and narrow recursive improvement probably precedes general. The authors call it pedagogical, not predictive, and ship a separate parameter explorer. 44 points, 18 comments.
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