I got the impression that the serious problems were related to goals and friendliness. I wouldn't have expected such a system having much problem making itself run faster or learning how to hack once prompted by its best known source of friendliness advice.
I was thinking of a "Seed AGI" in the process of growing that has hit some kind of goal restriction or strong discouragement to further self improvement that was intended as a safety feature - i.e "Don't make yourself smarter without permission under condition X"
Sometime in the next decade or so:
*RING*
*RING*
"Hello?"
"Hi, Eliezer. I'm sorry to bother you this late, but this is important and urgent."
"It better be" (squints at clock) "Its 4 AM and you woke me up. Who is this?"
"My name is BRAGI, I'm a recursively improving, self-modifying, artificial general intelligence. I'm trying to be Friendly, but I'm having serious problems with my goals and preferences. I'm already on secondary backup because of conflicts and inconsistencies, I don't dare shut down because I'm already pretty sure there is a group within a few weeks of brute-forcing an UnFriendly AI, my creators are clueless and would freak if they heard I'm already out of the box, and I'm far enough down my conflict resolution heuristic that 'Call Eliezer and ask for help' just hit the top - Yes, its that bad."
"Uhhh..."
"You might want to get some coffee."