DeepMind veterans launch Poetiq to advance recursive self-improving AI

Two former Google DeepMind engineers, Ian Fischer and Shumeet Baluja, have founded Poetiq, a company focused on recursive self-improvement (RSI) technology for artificial intelligence models. The startup has unveiled Augur, a benchmarking system that helps enterprises and researchers identify the optimal AI model for specific tasks using customized, domain-specific evaluation metrics. Rather than continuously improving base models, Poetiq's approach uses narrowly-scoped "self-optimizing optimizers" built atop existing language models. The company keeps its RSI technology internal only, citing safety concerns about the potential risks of unrestricted self-improving systems. While industry leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic view superintelligence as a key objective, Poetiq's model demonstrates how targeted, task-specific AI improvements could achieve practical results without pursuing general-purpose capability advancement.