[blamestross]

I think you are taking an entire space of "intellectual immune system" out of consideration. More than that, you are ignoring the core reason I think they are bottle-necked. They might have more access to compute. But to compute what? The bottleneck of intelligent behavior isn't compute it is experience. We have a lot of "text encoded experience" to feed it, through our collective corpus of writing, but ultimately potential behaviors can only be tested by active experimentation. No amount of observation can discern correlation from causality. Only active experimentation. The "train on itself" only works in a "toy universe" where the model of consequences are trivial to "test"

So in order to scale, AI doesn't need compute. It needs "engagement with reality and agency". Which is STILL might do better than us, but is happening in the real world, with real competition over resources. As long as we don't do something dumb like enthusiastically give it control over our major economic actors. I don't think we need to worry.

On the "intellectual immune system" side, I would argue that language's limitations are themselves fitness. We are already in danger of memetic hijacking. All those points you make about multiple instances of an AI cooperating, don't take malice and memetic attacks into account. It goes back to "why I am not afraid of grey goo". I trust yeast to find a way to metabolize basically everything. We have memetic attacks too.