There are two kinds of relevant hypothetical innovations: those that enable chatbot-led autonomous research, and those that enable superintelligence. It’s plausible that there is no need for (more of) the former, so that mere scaling through human efforts will lead to such chatbots in a few years regardless. (I think it’s essentially inevitable that there is currently enough compute that with appropriate innovations we can get such autonomous human-scale-genius chatbots, but it’s unclear if these innovations are necessary or easy to discover.) If autonomous chatbots are still anything like current LLMs, they are very fast compared to humans, so they quickly discover remaining major innovations of both kinds.
In principle, even if innovations that enable superintelligence (at scale feasible with human efforts in a few years) don’t exist at all, extremely fast autonomous research and engineering still lead to superintelligence, because they greatly accelerate scaling. Physical infrastructure might start scaling really fast using pathways like macroscopic biotech even if drexlerian nanotech is too hard without superintelligence or impossible in principle. Drosophila biomass doubles every 2 days, small things can assemble into large things.
There are two kinds of relevant hypothetical innovations: those that enable chatbot-led autonomous research, and those that enable superintelligence. It’s plausible that there is no need for (more of) the former, so that mere scaling through human efforts will lead to such chatbots in a few years regardless. (I think it’s essentially inevitable that there is currently enough compute that with appropriate innovations we can get such autonomous human-scale-genius chatbots, but it’s unclear if these innovations are necessary or easy to discover.) If autonomous chatbots are still anything like current LLMs, they are very fast compared to humans, so they quickly discover remaining major innovations of both kinds.
In principle, even if innovations that enable superintelligence (at scale feasible with human efforts in a few years) don’t exist at all, extremely fast autonomous research and engineering still lead to superintelligence, because they greatly accelerate scaling. Physical infrastructure might start scaling really fast using pathways like macroscopic biotech even if drexlerian nanotech is too hard without superintelligence or impossible in principle. Drosophila biomass doubles every 2 days, small things can assemble into large things.