When AI builds AI: The next great inventors might not be human

DeepSeek’s blockbuster release of its R1 reasoning model on Jan. 20 unleashed a firestorm of discussion about the U.S./China technological rivalry and the wisdom of AI infrastructure spending, resulting in a sharp dip in the stock prices of many leading AI companies. But buried within all this controversy lies perhaps the least-discussed and most consequential trend in the journey toward artificial general intelligence: the increasing role of AI systems in designing, building, and refining their next-generation successors.