OpenAI's marketing department checked if this headline would create a lot of clicks, after they reassured people that their LLM "AI" would definitely not take over the world.
True, but 'self-replication, and self-improvement' don't seem that implausible. If future corpora include LLM training repos and/or weights, we're not too far from imagining that an LLM with some overarching architecture (eg terminal access for training, similar to how Bing Chat apparently can issue and process search queries), could directly output model weights. Given the inherent difficulty of interpreting those weights, we arguably wouldn't be too far from a singularity definition.