The singularity, as defined by Hinton (and others) as RSI (Recursive Self Improvement) may actually be beginning already, as OpenAI has announced an AI acting as a "research intern" (!).
How is it improving, that would require rearranging its weights and biases which it cannot do easily or quickly.
How is this different from arguing that Microsoft Clippy was RSI? An AI tool being involved in the process of work can't be the bar for RSI.
I don't think there can be a coherent definition of RSI unless people lay out their theory for how intelligence scales. LLM-assisted coding is great but respectfully optimizing pytorch features or whatever is not gonna lead to exponential improvements. That approach to scaling diminished years ago, leading all the labs to switch to reasoning.
Now it seems reasoning is also yielding diminishing returns, so all the labs are pivoting to specializing in particular fields like math / infosec / biology. They're improving due to accessing new proprietary training data and doing RL with human experts. Again I don't really see any amount of "AI research interns" leading to an exponential improvement to this strategy, they're not the bottleneck in the first place.