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Agents & self-improvement System technical lens

Darwin Godel Machine: Open-Ended Evolution of Self-Improving Agents

Jenny Zhang, Shengran Hu, Cong Lu, Robert Lange, Jeff Clune

Key signal

A self-improving coding-agent system that modifies its own code, validates changes on benchmarks, and keeps a growing archive of diverse agents.

Open research question

Can self-modifying agent archives continue producing transferable capability gains after benchmark feedback becomes sparse, noisy, or vulnerable to overfitting?

Source date
ASI Research note

DGM is one of the clearest empirical steps toward recursive self-improvement: the system edits its own codebase and validates those edits against software engineering benchmarks.

Results

The reported run improved SWE-bench performance from 20.0% to 50.0% and Polyglot from 14.2% to 30.7%, while maintaining an archive of many generated agents instead of climbing a single hill.

ASI relevance

Open-ended archives matter. ASI progress may depend less on one perfect update and more on preserving diverse stepping stones, including changes that look locally odd but unlock later improvements.