Could Advanced AI Accelerate the Pace of AI Progress? Interviews with AI Researchers
Discussions about AI progress often center on the importance of compute scaling and algorithmic improvements to achieve new capabilities, and there is evidence that AI systems are beginning to contribute to AI progress. This paper explores what might happen to the pace of progress in a scenario where AI systems could fully automate AI research. We present insights from interviews with AI researchers from leading AI companies to explore how this scenario would alter the pace of algorithmic progress and what bottlenecks might impede rapid advancement. We find that AI researchers expect compute to remain a bottleneck and that abundant cognitive labor could drastically shift and accelerate the dynamics surrounding AI progress despite the compute bottleneck.