Comment by breuleux

It's also unclear how intelligence actually scales in practice. A greater intelligence would be better at researching intelligence, but also harder to improve, so why would it explode rather than go up steadily? What are the actual resource requirements of various types of intelligence like persuasion or embodied intelligence? Coding, translating, copywriting, could very well be low-hanging fruits, very easy tasks we're very bad at, which doesn't say much about the hard tasks we're good at (embodied/animal intelligence, most likely).

There is also the problem of alignment, which is verifying that version N+1 behaves in a way that version N approves of. This is ostensibly the problem that we humans have with respect to AI development -- how to make sure they align with our values -- but it's also true of AI with respect to its own successors. Improving oneself without losing the plot would necessarily be slower than throwing stuff at the wall like evolution does.