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80,000 Hours Podcast

80,000 Hours Podcast

Why the intelligence explosion can't happen inside a data centre | Tom Reed

Sep 10, 2026 · 22m

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AI systems are starting to build themselves . Because each generation of model will be better at building its successor than the last, it seems plausible that the full automation of AI R&D could rapidly lead to an exponential growth in overall AI capabilities. A natural inference is that domain-general superintelligence arrives shortly after AI research is automated. Host Tom Reed does not think this will happen. He believes the automation of AI R&D will not rapidly lead to domain-general superintelligence because: It’s impossible to get good at most things without practice. AI companies lack the data their models would need to practice most things. This can’t be fixed with “sample…