Ex-Anthropic, DeepMind researcher Yao Shunyu reportedly starts RSI firm at $2B valuation
Market reports dated Oct 13 say Yao Shunyu — a 29-year-old Tsinghua physics graduate and Stanford theoretical-physics PhD who worked on Claude and Gemini — has started a company in the RSI (recursive self-improvement) space to build customized models for enterprises, at a rumored valuation of about $2 billion with mostly overseas backers; the report is unconfirmed and no funding amount has been disclosed. Yao joined Anthropic in October 2024, contributing to agentic coding and tool-use research for Claude 3.7 and reinforcement-learning foundations for the Claude 4 family, and left partly over the company's China-related stance before joining Google DeepMind on Sept 29, 2025. The piece also surveys the crowded RSI field, including Tian Yuandong's Recursive Superintelligence, Jeff Dean's Discovery Loop, Sakana AI and China's Chaoyan Intelligence, noting there is no consensus on technical approach and that automated research may raise compute bills before it lowers them.
If confirmed, it would add another frontier-lab researcher to the RSI startup wave, though the field still lacks proven products and an agreed technical path — his official response and first product are what to watch.