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DB Dave Blundin Dave Blundin Venture investor and serial entrepreneur, managing partner at Link Ventures and chairman of Cogo Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“If you go to Noam Brown over at OpenAI and say, 'give me your 10 best ideas on what to work on next week that might make the algorithms faster, smarter, bigger, better,' and then you go to the AI that just solved Navier-Stokes and ask for its 10 best ideas, if Noam has six out of 10 good ideas and the AI has one out of 10, you're way past RSI, because the AI is effectively a multi-billion person research force and Noam is still one guy.”

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“If you go to Noam Brown over at OpenAI and say, 'give me your 10 best ideas on what to work on next week that might make the algorithms faster, smarter, bigger, better,' and then you go to the AI that just solved Navier-Stokes and ask for its 10 best ideas, if Noam has six out of 10 good ideas and the AI has one out of 10, you're way past RSI, because the AI is effectively a multi-billion person research force and Noam is still one guy.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

Context

Salim asked how we would know if recursive self-improvement had arrived. Dave offered a thought experiment about the volume of research ideas: since ideas can be tested by running code, even a low hit rate wins at scale.

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Transcript

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis Around 41:52 into the episode
Salim Ismail

If we hit RSI, how would we know? Like, what's the benchmark that would tell you that?

Speaker 3

…And every chart, every one of those sigmoidal curves points to us being either at or past the point where substantially all research at this point is actually being conducted by computer, by machine researchers rather than by human researchers. I think that's As decent a definition of RSI as any.

Dave Blundin

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And a little subtlety to add in there. If you go to Noam Brown over at OpenAI and you say, hey, Noam, you're a brilliant AI researcher. Give me your 10 best ideas on what to work on next week that might make the algorithms faster, smarter, bigger, better. Okay, write those 10 ideas down. Now let's go to Astra. And you just solved Navier-Stokes. Okay. Give me your 10 best ideas. If Noam has six out of 10 good ideas and the AI has one out of 10, you're way past RSI because the AI is effectively a multi-billion person research force and NOAA is still one guy. And so, and they're all going to get tested. It's not like there's like a, you know, it's not like being a major league batter where it matters how many times you strike out. As long as you're hitting balls over the wall, you have an infinite number of pitches. You just test them all. And so that's why all the compute is getting sucked internally. So you're way past RSI if it has any good ideas at all. Does anyone believe that it doesn't have good ideas after Navier-Stokes? I mean, of course it does.

Salim Ismail

So you ask the AI to generate a bunch of options, then it tests the options and asks it to run a bunch more. And you just keep pushing that paradigm.

Dave Blundin

Yeah, and within that area of endeavor, there's no physical experiment required. It's all just run the code.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I completely agree, Dave. And I would say Navier-Stokes, what we saw was purportedly 10,000 agents being used to solve it, but then fast forward to the slop drop, and it was three agent hours per solved problem. So it may not even be the case. It may be the case that needing a fleet of brute…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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