Some references would have been helpful. Having said that, the downvoting is disgraceful.
If you have any references please do provide them. I honestly don't know if there is a good write up anywhere, and I haven't the time or inclination to write one myself. Especially as it would require a very long tutorial overview of the inner workings of modern approaches to AGI to adequately explain why running a human level AGI is such a resource intensive proposal.
The tl;dr is what I wrote: learning cycles would be hours or days, and a foom would require hundreds or thousands of learning cycles at minimum. There is just no plausible way for an intelligence to magic itself to super intelligence in less than large human timescales. I don't know how to succinctly explain that without getting knee deep in AI theory though.
I've been going through the AIFoom debate, and both sides makes sense to me. I intend to continue, but I'm wondering if there're already insights in LW culture I can get if I just ask for them.
My understanding is as follows:
The difference between a chimp and a human is only 5 million years of evolution. That's not time enough for many changes.
Eliezer takes this as proof that the difference between the two in the brain architecture can't be much. Thus, you can have a chimp-intelligent AI that doesn't do much, and then with some very small changes, suddenly get a human-intelligent AI and FOOM!
Robin takes the 5-million year gap as proof that the significant difference between chimps and humans is only partly in the brain architecture. Evolution simply can't be responsible for most of the relevant difference; the difference must be elsewhere.
So he concludes that when our ancestors got smart enough for language, culture became a thing. Our species stumbled across various little insights into life, and these got passed on. An increasingly massive base of cultural content, made of very many small improvements is largely responsible for the difference between chimps and humans.
Culture assimilated new information into humans much faster than evolution could.
So he concludes that you can get a chimp-level AI, and to get up to human-level will take, not a very few insights, but a very great many, each one slowly improving the computer's intelligence. So no Foom, it'll be a gradual thing.
So I think I've figured out the question. Is there a commonly known answer, or are there insights towards the same?