Ex-Deepmind VP Vinyals says AI self-improvement is coming but won't trigger an intelligence explosion

Oriol Vinyals, formerly head of research at Google DeepMind, believes that a sudden AI intelligence explosion through recursive self-improvement is unlikely. He states that AI can accelerate research by a factor of ten, but it encounters two main bottlenecks: generating ideas and reliably judging results. Additional obstacles include reward hacking and the speed of light, which impose further limits on self-improvement. Vinyals, who co-founded Discovery Loop with Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Quoc Le, aims to tackle these bottlenecks.