Yuandong Tian: co-writing a paper with GPT-5 made me fear job loss within 5 years
Yuandong Tian, a former Meta FAIR researcher and co-founder of Recursive Superintelligence, said on The Information Bottleneck podcast that he treated his final Meta paper — on the neural-network grokking phenomenon — as a collaboration with GPT-5, using the model to prove and check theorems and brainstorm, and estimates the workflow was roughly 6–10x faster. That experience, he said, led him to conclude his own job could be replaced within about five years, and to start a company instead: "rather than passively lose my job, I'd rather start a company heading in that direction." He was also skeptical of full autonomy, saying models asked to generate ideas on their own produce mediocre ones and that humans still frame the questions and validate results. He argued that restricting recursive self-improvement is hard because the boundary is blurry, and said Recursive will open-source its research. Claims such as the company's reported $4.65 billion valuation and over $650 million raise, and OpenAI's unreleased internal model producing 722 math manuscripts, come from the article and interview accounts.
A senior researcher publicly saying frontier models have already reshaped his research workflow — and may replace his job — adds a concrete data point to debates about AI automating research and recursive self-improvement.