“Full automation of AI R&D probably yields a large speed up even without a software-only singularity” by Ryan Greenblatt

Subtitle: Full automation likely yields a one-time speed-up and higher returns from compute.

This is a somewhat technical note.

By “software-only singularity”, I mean that, after full automation of AI R&D, progress gets faster and faster due to smarter AIs driving increasingly fast rates of improvement in algorithms (overcoming diminishing returns), and that this lasts long enough to yield a large amount of progress (e.g. at least 4 years of progress in 1 year). The equivalent statement in jargon is: r is significantly greater than 1 (implying progress is getting faster and faster) and this remains the case for long enough to get large amounts of progress. For context, see How quick and big would a software intelligence explosion be?

Even without a “software-only singularity”, I think full automation of AI R&D probably greatly speeds up progress for two main reasons:

• You get a one-time speed up from automation and this speed up seems like it will be pretty large (even with r<1). See How quick and big would a software intelligence explosion be? for discussion and see the AI Futures Model for an end-to-end model that naturally incorporates this effect. Quantitatively, with my median [...]

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
May 27th, 2026

Source:
https://blog.redwoodresearch.org/p/full-automation-of-ai-r-and-d-probably

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.