A note for people expecting the Singularity any day now

Before we get to recursive self-improvement, there is a slightly awkward intermediate step nobody seems very interested in: AI has to know what the hell is happening to itself while it is working. Current frontier models can be extraordinarily capable, but they still do not have reliable introspective access to their own internal processes. They cannot simply inspect themselves and tell you: - what exactly made this reasoning attempt succeed, - which internal bottleneck is limiting them right now, - where more compute would actually help, - which lesson from the last attempt should become persistent knowledge, - whether an apparent improvement is real or just overfitting to an evaluator, - or which part of themselves should be changed to become better next time. We keep compensating for this from the outside. We give them scaffolds. Memory systems. Evaluators. Agent loops. Tooling. Sandboxes. Human feedback. External search. Carefully designed environments that decide what they are allowed to modify and what counts as success. And some of this works remarkably well. But notice what that means. We are not yet watching an intelligence calmly understand its own machinery and recursively redesign itself. We are building increasingly elaborate machinery around an intelligence that cannot reliably see its own machinery. That may eventually lead to recursive self-improvement. Maybe surprisingly quickly. But “the model is very smart” and “the system can autonomously understand, manage, and improve the process that makes it smart” are not the same capability. There is a rather large missing arrow between them. So whenever I see another prediction that the Singularity may arrive next Tuesday, I keep wondering: Who, exactly, is going to know what to improve on Wednesday?