Yes, that's what I'm saying. If you can make an AI that's roughly human IQ (even like 80 IQ), but thinks 100x faster than a human, then that's something very much like, if not identical to, "a superhuman AI."

So when you say, "Here's how we'll get superhuman AI: We'll network together bunches of 80 IQ AI's that think 100x faster than a human," it's kind of assuming its own solution.

The 100x faster scenario is not really clear to me. Computers already "think" orders of magnitude faster for some things and orders of magnitude slower in other things. I am not sure this will be all that much more useful than the status quo. Unless they modeling a human brain than I see 100x faster being a useful thing to measure. Otherwise, I don't see speed increases being all that critical to making a superhuman AI.

I think networks of AI can become super powerful even without being nearly as smart as individual humans. AI will only need to approach certain aspects of humans IQ. It can still be much dumb than us in most ways. Most of human progress has been build up because of vague interactions and feedback loops via markets, religions, and nations.

You said that the AIs would be able to "communicate and interact" much faster than humans. If they can't think much faster than humans, then they can't communicate and interact (meaningfully) much faster than humans.

You can think much faster than you can express yourself. You can express yourself much faster than most people can understand you. You can only have a back and forth communication with a tiny number of people at once.

Why would you network them? Just add more ram.

Ask the guy who came up with this scenario. But, obviously, we do at some point find it easier to set up side-by-side computers with (relatively) high-latency connections (like, say, ethernet) than to try to put more computing resources together with low-latency connections (like motherboard busses), for physical reasons.

Reminds me of the story about the galaxy spanning AI in the Dune series. With a latency of 10000 light years between it's various instances.

How did they physically get the machines so far apart in the first place? No wormholes??

They had FTL capable ships. The AI used to sync updates using that.

Same reason why culture matters more than individual IQ. Most of human progress is cause because there are many people learn from each other and making millions of tiny improvements over time.