One main thing from which foom depends is the number of AIs which are fooming simultaneously. If it only one, it is real foom. If hundreds, it is just a transition to new equilibrium where will be many superintelligent agents.
The answer on one or many AIs critically depends on the speed of fooming. If fooming doubling time is miliseconds, than one AI wins. But if it weeks or months there will be many fooming AIs, which may result in war between AIs or equilibrium.
But what is more important here is a question: how strong fooming is compare to overall speed of progress in the AI field? If AI is fooming with doubling time of 3 weeks, but the field has speed of 1 month, its is not real fooming.
If AI depends of one crutial insight, which will result in 10 000 times improvement, that will be the real fooming.
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?