Recursion Is The Next Scaling Law In AI

Name: Recursion Is The Next Scaling Law In AI
Uploaded: 2026-05-08T15:31:34.934Z
Duration: 37 min 53 s
Channel: Y Combinator
Description: A 7-million parameter model outperforming models a thousand times its size on tasks like ARC Prize. That's what recursive reasoning unlocks. In this episode of Decoded, YC's Ankit Gupta and Francois Chaubard break down two recent papers on recursive AI models, HRMs and TRMs, that are achieving s...

By Y Combinator

Categories: VC, Startup, Design

Transcript Excerpt

Welcome back to another episode of Decoded. Today, I'm back with YC visiting partner Francois Shaard to talk about one of the most interesting recent trends in AI research, recursion. Specifically, we're going to talk about how we can improve a model's reasoning performance by using recursion at inference time rather than by just making the model bigger and bigger. There were two papers that made the power of this approach really clear in 2025. One on hierarchal reasoning models or HRM and anoth...