No Second Run: Does RSI Stop at Frontier Pre-training?

As a base model, 801-30B-A3B outperforms Qwen3-30B-A3B and Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B, trailing only the larger Qwen3.5-35B-A3B, and keeps this position under identical SFT; with lightweight SFT alone, it achieves the highest average on four agentic benchmarks against fully post-trained models, including Qwen3.6-35B-A3B. It comes from a paper posted to arXiv on 10 November 2026. Pre-training is where every foundation model begins; bringing recursive self-improvement (RSI) there would let AI improve the process that creates AI. Yet public RSI work has so far targeted only post-training, which starts from an existing base model, runs trials costing GPU-hours, and returns verifiable scores. Pre-training breaks all three conditions at orders-of-magnitude higher cost: a run consumes hundreds of thousands of GPU-hours over months and cannot be repeated; its objective, post-training headroom, cannot be read off any single score; and what must improve is not a model but the whole production system, from data pipelines and training infrastructure to the teams that run them. To our knowledge, we are the first to apply RSI to an entire frontier pre-training run from scratch and to report it in detail. RSI does not stop at frontier pre-training, but it changes form: since no end-to-end loop can close over a single unrepeatable run, we decompose it into smaller loops that can, each repairing a step the full run breaks. The result is 801-30B-A3B-Base, a 30B-A3B MoE trained from scratch on 11.8T tokens in three months by a newly formed team. We release it as a base model; the lightweight SFT reported here (6B tokens, no RL) only probes post-training headroom. Since post-training RSI presupposes a strong base model, bringing RSI into pre-training acts on the foundation every later stage builds on. We open-source 801-30B-A3B-Base and the lightweight SFT data at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/801-30B .

Why it counts

As a base model, 801-30B-A3B outperforms Qwen3-30B-A3B and Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B, trailing only the larger Qwen3.5-35B-A3B, and keeps this position under identical SFT; with lightweight SFT alone, it achieves the highest average on four agentic benchmarks against fully post-trained models, including Qwen3.6-35B-A3B. Pre-training is where every foundation model begins; bringing recursive self-improvement (RSI) there would let AI improve the process that creates AI. Pre-training breaks all three conditions at orders-of-magnitude higher cost: a run consumes hundreds of thousands of GPU-hours over months and cannot be repeated; its objective, post-training headroom, cannot be read off any single score; and what must improve is not a model but the whole production system, from data pipelines and training infrastructure to the teams that run them.

Sources

Primary source: primary source

What is not known

This brief does not claim independent replication. Claims that appear only on X and not in the primary source stay unknown.