Paradigm releases RSI Simulator, a web game that models the economics of recursive self-improvement

RSI Simulator

Paradigm built a web game where you run an AI lab, investing labor, compute, and data until you hit self-sustaining superintelligence. It is based on the Elasticity Institute's paper on the economics of recursive self-improvement, with parameters tuned for pedagogy, not prediction. A companion explorer lets you adjust elasticities yourself. Key takeaways: weak links dominate—compute and data can bottleneck even superhuman AI researchers; recursive self-improvement may come in spurts and stop before physical limits; a narrow intelligence explosion in AI research itself could arrive first. All predictions hinge on elasticity parameters, so tracking those metrics matters.

Why it matters: Paradigm turned an RSI economics paper into an interactive web game—novel format, concrete parameter-backed conclusions. The bottleneck-dominates insight is directly useful for practitioners. Score capped at 78 because it's a thought-experiment visualization, not a real produc...