Google: no measurable acceleration of AI research from AI yet

Google engineer Haydn Belfield says DeepMind sees no measurable speedup in AI research driven by AI. AI writes over 75% of production code, but 88% of changes still need human oversight. Google's internal General Capability Index shows steady growth with no sudden jump.

Why it matters: Recursive self-improvement is a central assumption behind fast-takeoff forecasts and some of the safety alarm raised recently, such as the Anthropic study on self-replicating small models. Data from inside a frontier lab suggesting coding automation is not yet translating into faster research is a useful counterweight, though it is Google's own self-reported metric.