Counterfactual of dropping a seed AI into a world without other capable AI

"Well yeah, if we dropped a superintelligence into a world full of humans. But realistically the rest of the world will be undergoing intelligence explosion too. And indeed the world as a whole will undergo a faster intelligence explosion than any particular project could; to think that one project could pull ahead of everyone else is to think that, prior to intelligence explosion, there would be a single project innovating faster than the rest of the world combined!" [1]

"Christiano and other current notions of continuous takeoff are perfectly consistent with the counterfactual claim that, if an already superhuman ‘seed AI’ were dropped into a world empty of other AI, it would undergo recursive self-improvement." [2]

"When we build AGI we will be optimizing the chimp-equivalent-AI for usefulness, and it will look nothing like an actual chimp (in fact it would almost certainly be enough to get a decisive strategic advantage if introduced to the world of 2018)." [3]