Technically you can cheat by using the information in human brains to create upload-based superintelligences along the lines of Stuart's proposal, make them do the research for you, etc., so it seems likely to me that the upper bound should hold... but I appreciate your point and agree that my comment was wrong as stated.
When talking about upper bounds we cannot afford to just cheat saying humans can probably figure it out. That isn't an upper bound - it is an optimistic prediction about human potential. Moreover we still need a definition of Friendliness built in so we can tell whether this thing that the human researchers come up with is Friendliness or some other thing with that name. (Even an extremely 'meta' reference to a definition is fine but still requires more bits to point to which part of the humans is able to define Friendliness.)
Upper bounds are hard. But ye...
The most simple, able to self-improve "seed" for a superintelligence must be how complex?
Give your (wild) estimation or a pure guess in the terms of bits.
Do you reckon it is 1000 bits enough? At least 1000000 is required? More than 10^20 bits?
I wonder what your approximate numbers are.
Thank you!