Claude Opus 5.5 beats a human baseline and AI researchers move up their self improvement clock

Vals AI just watched a Claude model out-train a published human benchmark, and the firm's response was to make its self-improving-AI prediction arrive a month sooner, not later. Vals AI updated its Recursive Self-Improvement Index on October 15 after testing Claude Opus 5.5, and the independent benchmark firm didn't like what it saw, or rather, it liked it too much. Opus 5.5 topped four of the five research tasks on the index, and on one of them, training a small language model from scratch inside a 24-hour compute budget, it actually beat the published human baseline: 0.8308 bits per byte against the 0.85 BPB mark that researchers had set as the standard to clear.

First reported by Startup Fortune. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.