Having read the paper, I agree that this is an enormous effort, but I didn't see anything that was particularly surprising from a technical point of view - and nothing of Singularity-level significance. The use of AI to train AI - as a source of synthetic data, or as an evaluation tool - is absolutely widespread. You will find similar examples in almost any AI paper dealing with a system of comparable scale.
Yeah I know, but you sometimes see posts on HN that talk as if AI isn't already being used for self-improvement. I guess the subtlety is that people tend to imagine some sort of generic recursive self-improvement, and overlook the more tightly focused ways it's being used.
