Comment by Yoshua Bengio

Moreover, frontier AI companies are seeking to develop AI with a specific skill that could very well unlock all others and turbocharge advances: AIs with the ability to advance research in AI. An AI system that would be as capable at AI research as the topmost handful of researchers in an AI Lab would multiply the advanced research workforce by orders of magnitude. Although it takes tens of thousands of GPUs to train the AI, once trained it can be deployed at inference-time in parallel, yielding the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of automated AI workers. Such scaling up could greatly accelerate the path towards superhuman AI systems. The materialization of this scenario could lead to a fast transition from AGI to Artificial Super-Intelligence (ASI), ranging from a few months to a few years according to some experts. Imagining such possibilities can be challenging, and we have no guarantee that they will materialize, as the pace and direction of future AI development are largely dependent on the political decisions and scientific advances in months and years ahead. Unverified source (2024)