We don't currently have completely automated computer factories. Large chunks of manufacturing are automated, sure, but a) those automated segments are monitored and controlled by humans, and b) there are also significant parts of the assembly process that are fully manual.
Does that mean that fully automated construction is impossible? Of course not. But it does mean it's not something we are certain we can do today, without additional genuine breakthroughs.
Furthermore, what you're proposing is not merely automated construction, but automated improvements to the construction process. That means you need to be able to reconfigure the entire manufacturing process without human intervention. I feel reasonably confident in saying this is not feasible with our current technology.
Beyond that, your very first comment—about needing the means—is very much nontrivial. I don't recall the exact figures, but I was definitely seeing stories about ChatGPT being massively expensive to run, both in terms of money and in terms of energy. And that's just a current-generation LLM. Attempting to bootstrap from there to....the singularity, I guess? is likely to take more energy than is feasible to dedicate to any such project even if it were possible.
And finally, you say the AI will "train future generations"—train on what? An LLM's quality is always going to be largely dictated by its training data. How is an LLM going to be able to train a next-generation LLM any better than it was trained, especially, again, without human intervention? It's nearly impossible for what you're describing to result in anything that can do useful work, simply because training like that requires humans in the loop giving feedback at every step.
We don't currently have completely automated computer factories. Large chunks of manufacturing are automated, sure, but a) those automated segments are monitored and controlled by humans, and b) there are also significant parts of the assembly process that are fully manual.
Does that mean that fully automated construction is impossible? Of course not. But it does mean it's not something we are certain we can do today, without additional genuine breakthroughs.
Furthermore, what you're proposing is not merely automated construction, but automated improvements to the construction process. That means you need to be able to reconfigure the entire manufacturing process without human intervention. I feel reasonably confident in saying this is not feasible with our current technology.
Beyond that, your very first comment—about needing the means—is very much nontrivial. I don't recall the exact figures, but I was definitely seeing stories about ChatGPT being massively expensive to run, both in terms of money and in terms of energy. And that's just a current-generation LLM. Attempting to bootstrap from there to....the singularity, I guess? is likely to take more energy than is feasible to dedicate to any such project even if it were possible.
And finally, you say the AI will "train future generations"—train on what? An LLM's quality is always going to be largely dictated by its training data. How is an LLM going to be able to train a next-generation LLM any better than it was trained, especially, again, without human intervention? It's nearly impossible for what you're describing to result in anything that can do useful work, simply because training like that requires humans in the loop giving feedback at every step.