alt Hacker News> Let's also imagine for the purpose of conversation that one of the things that can be gotten at an extremely high skill level through increased intelligence is the power of persuasion.
That feels like a bait and switch slyly introducing a whole new dimension. The discussion started with establishing that LLMs are extremely helpful with AI research. What is the evidence to justify rapidly improving persuasion skills? Even the scenario you've outlined hinges on a human being stupid enough to take LLM advice wholesale -- and every conversation that hypes up AI takes us one step closer to a world where some susceptible human feels amenable to that.
No bait-and-switch here. The discussion started with the idea that LLMs are helpful at improving LLMs. The goal of improving an LLM is to make the LLM more "intelligent" (whatever humans think that means). If they're helpful at that, they have to keep becoming more "intelligent".
I didn't present any evidence that more-intelligent means more-persuasive. If you don't think it does, then there is nothing to think about in the point I made, as no matter how "smart" the models get they will likely remain subject to human wills.