Rinse and repeat.
That is exponential take off.
At the point where you have an army of AIs running at 1000x human speed it can just ask it to design the mechanisms for and write the code to make robots that automate any possible physical task.
We also have people brilliant enough to maybe solve the AGI problem or cause our extinction. Some are amoral. Many mechanisms pushed human intelligences in other directions. They probably will for our AGI’s assuming we even give them all the power unchecked. Why are they so worried the intelligent agents will not likewise be misdirected or restrained?
What smart, resourceful humans have done (and not done) is a good, starting point for what AGI would do. At best, they’ll probably help optimize some chips and LLM runtimes. Patent minefields with sub-28nm design, especially mask-making, will keep unit volumes of true AGI’s much lower at higher prices than systems driven by low-paid workers with some automation.
Not if you remember to count all the computations being done by the quintillions of nanobots across the world known as "human cells."
That's not only inside cells, and not just neurons either. For example, your thyroid is busy brute-forcing the impossibly large space of antibody combinations, and putting every candidate cell-release through a very rigorous set of acceptance tests.