When people talk about recursive self improvement, they mean autonomous self improvement.

No humans in the loop.

What semi-supervised learning tells us is that any system with no humans in the loop will at some point reach a limit, and require more supervised data.

Deep learning had no humans in the loop, but there's always a bigger outer loop with a human somewhere.

And, the explicit goal of these companies is to break that bigger outer loop. That's the reason for the investment, and the reason for the valuation.

You can place bets that these companies will be failures if you want.