I agree with your premise though, we require specialized humans to generate the highest quality data to improve the models, and it would be more impressive if the models could do this themselves...

Anthropic have done experiments with having "dumber" models try and make a smarter model, smarter, but it still seems tricky so far.

But if you think about humans, we have the same issue. If you have a super smart person, how do they get smarter? Can you have dumber people make a smarter person even smarter? It's a hard question.