Y Combinator: Recursion Is Quietly Rewriting AI’s Rules—Not Just Bigger Transformers
Two new papers show that looping a model’s own computations—recursion—lets small AI models outthink giants, upending the scaling playbook.
- Recursion at inference time lets small models outperform much larger ones on reasoning tasks.
- Deep equilibrium learning and fixed-point iteration make deep recursion trainable, avoiding RNN pitfalls.