If there is a GPT-5 developed which is a similar amount better than GPT-4, as GPT-4 was to GPT-3, then will GPT-5 be capable of recursive self-improvement with a minimal amount of prompt engineering / scaffolding?
Note: recursive self-improvement, in the early stages, doesn't require novel scientific breakthroughs. It is sufficient to successfully integrate existing work that is not yet part of the model. Of course, to be 'recursive' this must be shown to repeat, and there must be evidence that the later generations are capable of advancements that the initial generation was not capable of.
Since this market is getting more interest, I thought I'd put some clarification here. I'm up for having a 3rd party arbiter of this question, details can be arranged closer to the close date.
If GPT-5 comes out before the stated close of the market, then the market will close as soon as the question can be evaluated. Subtle self-improvements which quickly plateau out, such as has been seen so far with GPT-4 using Reflexion, will not count. The process doesn't need to be entirely 'within' the model, as direct modifications of the model's weights. It could include external code wrappers and memory systems interfacing through an API. The system does need to show multiple steps of clear improvement, where the later steps are demonstrably better at making further improvements than the earlier steps.
As clarified in the comments, if the recursive self-improvement can't be clearly demonstrated using less than 3% of the FLOPs used in training GPT-5, then it doesn't count.