Alex J. Champandard argues Recursive Language Models lack novelty, debating Grad over whether the paradigm differs fundamentally from Claude
Grad defines RLMs via subagents and programmatic tool calling
I don’t think this makes sense RLM as an idea from my perspective is mainly the combination of subagents, PTC (programmatic tool calling), and programmatic context discovery
If Claude starts saying how PTC is really good for something, it’s not invalid to say it’s more RLM like as it’s something an RLM could do and a key part of its performance
Alex J. Champandard 🌱@alexjcThe authors claim that none of the specific ideas of RLM are novel nor unique to it. So you can't isolate that single concept of "programmatic access to context" alone, it must be assessed more broadly along with the other ideas of RLM — including the persistent REPL and the specifics of the mechanisms used for recursion (both of which also used first elsewhere). From that perspective, and along those axes, Claude is clearly a different solution unless you weaken the definition of RLM to the point it's meaningless...
@alexjc @willdepue @georgejrjrjr No but calling tools like subagents, and reading large contexts through the REPL is a core idea here not an interpretation
Alex J. Champandard 🌱@alexjcIt's certainly moving in interesting directions that are adjacent to RLM. But the PTC part is your interpretation, the original definitions are focused on *REPL* (persistent language environment) -- which was done before RLM was a twinkle in the authors eyes. PTC is imho very different than the REPL; having a good API for headless agents is also a new axis vs. tool calls; writing upfront orchestration scripts and not having LLM go step by step also differs. Lots of subtleties getting lost because of poor definitions. It's all valuable work...