The Last AI Built by Humans: Toward Genuine Recursive Self-Improvement

The paper outlines an engineering-grounded framework for Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) in artificial intelligence. Introducing the Headroom-Closed Index (HCI) to diagnose capacity plateaus in current language models, the authors trace an evolution from autonomous execution and experience acquisition to full recursive meta-improvement. By examining practical testbeds such as scientific discovery and software engineering, the survey moves the discussion of autonomous self-refinement from speculative discourse toward an actionable roadmap with identifiable developmental bottlenecks.