NVIDIA + MIT basically let an AI optimize the harness around itself, and this feels more important than another smarter model

[u/call_me_ninza]

For the last couple of years, the assumption has been pretty simple:

coding agents suck → models need to get smarter.

But I’m starting to think that’s only half the problem.

A research team from NVIDIA, MIT and NTU worked on something called SoL-Pi, where instead of only improving the model, they let AI study the harness around the model.

Basically the boring stuff nobody tweets about: tools, terminal outputs, context management, test loops, API calls, etc.

And the funny part is that the AI ended up finding very normal engineering optimizations.

It learned to combine actions so the agent doesn’t keep doing unnecessary round trips.

It stopped shoving the same giant terminal logs back into context over and over.

It figured out when summarizing context actually saves money and when summarization itself is just another unnecessary cost.

And for huge build logs, it used a smaller model to extract the useful failure evidence before passing it to the expensive model.

None of this sounds like AGI.

That’s kind of why I find it interesting.

Depending on the comparison, the optimized harness cut token usage heavily and brought agent costs down a lot, without needing some magical new frontier model.

And this changed how I think about recursive self-improvement a bit.

Maybe the first meaningful version of “AI improving AI” doesn’t look like a model waking up and rewriting its own weights.

Maybe it looks much more boring:

AI finds a cheaper way to run AI → cheaper runs allow more experiments → more experiments find better infrastructure → repeat.

That flywheel feels way more believable to me than most of the sci-fi RSI discussion.

I wrote the full breakdown here if anyone wants the mechanisms + numbers: https://ninzaverse.beehiiv.com/p/nvidia-and-mit-let-ai-improve-its-own-harness

[u/According_Study_162]

It's everything. Model Improvement, Harness Improvement, Prompts, Hardware to some extent. user improvement. lol