“Quantity has a quality of its own” by djbinder

LessWrong (30+ Karma) · Oct 28, 2026 · 11m

People love to argue about whether AIs could recursively self-improve their way to superintelligence, each improvement making the next one easier as progress accelerates. I'm unsure. It could be that progress stalls at near-human or somewhat superhuman levels, that the ultimate qualitative limits of intelligence are not particularly beyond the human-level, or that the quantity of AI researchers involved is so vast that substantially superhuman AIs are created without strictly entering a super-exponential regime.

But honestly, I think recursive self-improvement is a little overrated. Even if…