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Richard Socher's Recursive raised a $4.65B seed to automate AI research, and its agent beat every human on NanoChat in under two days
On the Latent Space episode published 2026-09-14, Richard Socher detailed Recursive, an eight-co-founder startup valued near $5B on a $4.65B seed, with Jeff Clune, Tim Rocktäschel and Alexey Dosovitskiy among the founders. Its agent reached 0.937 bits per byte on NanoChat/NanoGPT in under two days, beating all human researchers and prior agents, topped SOL-ExecBench GPU kernel leaderboards without deep CUDA expertise, and found 30 bugs in the evaluation harnesses along the way. Socher's builder-facing claim is the useful one: harness optimization and reward engineering beat retraining, and simple reward specs get hacked.
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