Human bottlenecks are why I'm skeptical about the sensationalized version of RSI being talked about in the policy and safety world right now.
You can speed up, say, LLM architecture search by 1000x by removing humans and firehosing compute, but if that's 50% of your labor process (it isn't, ofc) and you only speed up the rest of the parts of the LLM production gantt chart by 2x, then your total speedup is ~4x.
That means faster capabilities -- all else being equal -- but I'm not sure this is so different from other progress speed-ups we've found in the past due to compute (e.g. the huge unlock with RL/synthetic data replacing 2022-3 era pretraining+manually obtained SFT).
And while some parts of the LLM production line are accelerating now and at any given moment, other parts of LLM development are attenuating now and at any given moment (e.g. growth in parameter count); all of this makes me skeptical we'll see the kind of idealized foom that keeps getting discussed.
I also feel there are only a handful of folks in a position to give a confident take on this, they're working in secrecy, but there's a memeification of RSI happening where many folks who *aren't* in a position to know are reifying RSI as *the* central policy construct of Q3 2026.
To be clear; there's a lot that can be automated and is being automated and we're learning to automate in LLM production. But claiming we're about to un-logjam the smoothnesss in labor productivity gains dictated by Amdahl's law feels like an unearned claim at the moment
cc'ing
@natolambert @thlarsen @tszzl @alexolegimas curious about yours and others' thoughts if you have time to respond