AGI feels like a marketing term to me now. I mainly see it as just research into how can we improve and scale the current model architectures we have to be better than the last one
Eh regardless of all that the answer is just “yes” imo: self-improvement is a necessary step to meaningful superintelligence. Perhaps not AGI but it obviously seems like a massive help if not absolutely strictly necessary.
In a way, that’s what modern multi-stage-trained foundational models already do: improve their weights intelligently. Having the same results in human readable code (what this is a first step towards) would be a lot more powerful…