Comment by rhubarbtree

Every frontier lab has maybe 100 top tier researchers, all of whom have limited short-term memory, need to sleep, eat, have biases, and can't rigorously parallelize themselves and run thousands of simultaneous experiments, while also modifying their own internal thought processes to a quantifiable degree. An AGI merely on the level of a mediocre AI researcher would be able to trivially leverage all these benefits, while also simply scaling its own compute (it is unlikely that the scaling gains would level out precisely at the level of a smart human)