Owen He

Co-founder, MakerMaker.AI

Search every verified Owen He interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Owen He, co-founder of MakerMaker.AI, appeared on an a16z podcast in October 2026 to discuss recursive self-improvement (RSI) in AI. He distinguished true RSI from using AI to automate parts of AI development, arguing that genuine RSI requires a closed loop where the system being improved is also the system doing the improving, across components such as models, harnesses, and potentially the broader AI stack. He stated that RSI is an overloaded term and emphasized the importance of clarifying what is being optimized and who or what is doing the optimizing, noting that human-assisted AI development is not RSI but rather autocatalysis. He also discussed the need for a unified mathematical framework to evaluate whether an overall system is actually improving, rather than applying isolated techniques. He suggested that real challenges may exist in less fashionable problem spaces, such as workflows in a garden host company in Wisconsin, and stressed that improvement must account for all resources, including man-hours and experimentation, to back claims of RSI. He indicated that the company has been thorough and has not released things until certain of correctness, and that more information would be shared soon.