Yesterday I left Opus 4.8 to go do some architecture research, with GPU access.
It replicated and trained a credible baseline. It implemented some ideas I'd been thinking about, and wrote custom CUDA kernels for them. It read and summarised dozens of related papers.
It has since run dozens of experiments, with minimal supervision. When a model is unstable it kills it, documents why, fires off a new configuration.
The realisation that frontier labs are doing this at scale with unlimited GPU and token budgets.
It actually scares me a bit. The realisation that the next big breakthroughs will only have light human involvement.
The prospect of recursive self improvement feels more to real to me all of sudden
