Seed AI is Artificial Intelligence designed for self-understanding, self-modification, and recursive self-enhancement.

-Self-understanding: The ability to read and comprehend source code; the ability to understand the function of a code fragment or the purpose of a module; the ability to understand how subsystems sum together to yield intelligence; plus the standard general-intelligence ability to observe and reflect on one's own thoughts.

-Self-modification: The ability to optimize a code fragment, modify the function of a module, or redesign one's own architecture.

-Recursive self-enhancement: The ability to make changes that genuinely increase intelligence, smartness, such that new possible improvements, or a new class of possible improvements, become visible to the AI.

Creating seed AI is the goal of several organizations. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence is the most prominent of those explicitly working to create seed AI. Others include the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, creator of the Novamente AI engine, and Adaptive Artificial Intelligence Incorporated.

Singularitarians believe seed AI is the technology most likely to bring about a technological singularity.