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You really can just siphon money out of the internet - people do it all the time to banks, in crypto, scams, social engineering and so on. Steal money, buy compute. Our AI could buy whatever it needs with stolen money, or it could work for its money, or its owners could buy more compute for it on the very reasonable assumption that this is the highest yielding investment in human history. We live in a service economy, bodies are not needed for a great deal of our work.
Say our AI costs 10 million dollars a day to run, (ChatGPT as a whole costs about 700K). 10 million dollars a day is peanuts in the global economy. Global cybercrime costs an enormous amount of money, 6 trillion a year. I imagine most of that cost includes the cost of fortifying websites, training people, fixing damage or whatever and only a small fraction is stolen. Even so, our AI needs only to grab 1% of that revenue and launder it to fund itself. This is not difficult. People do it all the time. And compute costs are falling, some smallish programs are being run on Macbooks as you explained earlier.
The danger is that somebody starts off with a weak superintelligence, perhaps from a closed experimental loop such as you nominate. Then it becomes a strong superintelligence rapidly by buying compute, developing architectural improvements and so on. Either it is controlled by some clique of programmers, bureaucrats or whatever (I think we both agree that this is a bad outcome) or it runs loose (also a bad outcome). The only good outcome is if progress is slow enough that power is distributed between the US, China, EU, hackers and enthusiasts and whoever else, that nobody gets a decisive strategic advantage. Recursive self-improvement in any meaningful form is catastrophic for humanity.
I think this means that you agree that superintelligences can recursively self-improve, that they're akin to another superintelligence? Then don't we agree?
Anyway, the authorities are extremely dopey, slow and stupid. The much vaunted US semiconductor sanctions against China meant that they simply... rented US compute to train their programs. Apparently stopping this is too hard for the all-powerful, all-knowing, invincible US government leviathan.
https://www.ft.com/content/9706c917-6440-4fa9-b588-b18fbc1503b9
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