My intuition says that if we took the 10000 most intelligent people in the world, put them together and told them to work on some technical project, that would be much less effective than if we could make 10000 copies of the most intelligent person, in part because the 10000th most intelligent person is much less productive than the 1st. As evidence for this, I note that there are very few people whose "known for" list on Wikipedia is nearly as long as von Neumann's, and you'd expect more such people if the productivity difference between the 1st and the 10000th weren't very large.

But if it turns out that I'm wrong, and it's not worth doing the cloning step, then I'd be happy with a "MSI-0.9" that just gathers 10000 top people and sets them to work on MSI-2 (or whatever technologies appears most important to getting a positive Singularity).