Definition
Plain language
A system that only feeds on its own outputs, with no fresh input from outside.
As stated in the literature
A self-referential generative regime where each step's input is the previous step's output, with no exogenous data; subject to information-theoretic contraction by the data processing inequality.
Also called: closed-loop
Why it matters: Closed-loop generative training tends to drift and collapse, which is a growing concern as the web fills with AI-produced content.
For example, a language model is repeatedly trained only on text generated by previous versions of itself, with no fresh human-written data added.
Heard on the show
“A notebook full of wrong principles read by the same frozen brain that wrote them is a closed loop with no one to catch the error.”Episode 186 — How a Frozen Model Went From 2% to 77% on Physics Puzzles — Without Retraining