In the scenario governed by data, the part that counts as self-improvement is where the AI puts itself through a process of optimisation by stochastic gradient descent with respect to that data.
You don’t need that much hardware for data to be a bottleneck. For example, I think that there are plenty of economically valuable tasks that are easier to learn than StarCraft. But we get StarCraft AIs instead because games are the only task where we can generate arbitrarily large amounts of data.
In the scenario governed by data, the part that counts as self-improvement is where the AI puts itself through a process of optimisation by stochastic gradient descent with respect to that data.
You don’t need that much hardware for data to be a bottleneck. For example, I think that there are plenty of economically valuable tasks that are easier to learn than StarCraft. But we get StarCraft AIs instead because games are the only task where we can generate arbitrarily large amounts of data.