Deep|LLM: RSI Is the Most Important Variable, and Compute Is the Deepest Moat

Executive Summary

July 2026 produced the sharpest drawdown of this cycle for the AI trade. Semiconductors posted their worst month since 2002, and more than $1 trillion of AI-linked market value came off. The concern behind the move is straightforward: coding looks like a special case that is hard to replicate, enterprise adoption is running behind expectations, and the "next coding" that would justify hundreds of billions of dollars of capex has not yet appeared.

We think the debate is framed around the wrong question. The market is evaluating AI through an application lens, looking for the next killer use case and checking whether current revenue covers capital expenditure. The industry's own objective, however, is AGI, and the mechanism most labs point to on that path is recursive self-improvement (RSI). A more useful way to think about it is as a sequence of capability milestones, each with its own commercial payoff. Coding capability has already been monetized, in the form of this year's first-half revenue inflection. The next milestone is continual learning, which lets models accumulate knowledge in deployment the way an employee does; combined with deployment mechanisms such as forward-deployed engineering, it will open up most of the enterprise opportunity. Full RSI, in which models participate in and accelerate their own development, sits furthest out and will determine the competitive structure that follows. Progress is visible at each stage, and in several places it is accelerating.

We make three claims.