1. labs have lots of inference capacity 2. they will have domain experts working on this so their efficiency is gonna be exponentially more (can direct LLM better, save money, reach same results faster)

You can't exceed roofline performance on hardware. There is an performance cap you can hit. This recursive self improvement stuff lets you be closer to the pareto frontier, but the idea that it is leading to some exponential growth is a total pipe dream.

fair enough

You say this like that isn’t how the vast majority of problems are solved…