Disagreement with bio anchors that lead to shorter timelines

In general, I have noticed a pattern where people are dismissive of recursive self improvement. To the extent people are still believing this, I would like to suggest this is a cached thought that needs to be refreshed. 

When it seemed like models with a chance of understanding code or mathematics were a long ways off - which it did (checks notes) two years ago, this may have seemed sane. I don't think it seems sane anymore.

What would it look like to be on the precipice of a criticality threshold?  I think it looks like increasingly capable models making large strides in coding and mathematics. I think it looks like feeding all of human scientific output into large language models. I think it looks a world where a bunch of corporations are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into coding models and are now in the process of doing the obvious things that are obvious to everyone. 

There's a garbage article going around with rumors of GPT-4, which appears to be mostly wrong. But from slightly-more reliable rumors, I've heard it's amazing and they're picking the low-hanging data set optimization fruits.

The threshold for criticality, in my opinion, requires a model capable of understanding the code that produced it as well as a certain amount of scientific intuition and common sense. This no longer seems very far away to me. 

But then, I'm no ML expert.