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I don't see a mention of the concept of "seed AI", which I believe came first from Turing himself.

High-level (even superhuman) artificial intelligence could come from AI that specializes in creating other, stronger AIs.

Those AIs in turn create slightly stronger AIs again, and so on ad infinitum. It could lead to sudden exponential growth of intelligence level, aka intelligence explosion

This approach is discussed in detail in Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence..."

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Seed AI is possible, but it requires first building an AI which is at least as intelligent as human AI researchers. We are nowhere near that point, and once we get there we will already have strong AI.

> at least as intelligent as human AI researchers

I don't think that's true. I see no reason why the seed AI must be as generally intelligent as a human in most respects. It may not need to have an understanding of it's physical surroundings, for example, which could mean avoiding building any computer vision components into the system. Further, it may be able to operate in a much more mathematical environment. It may be somewhat similar to a theorem prover that operates on computer programs.

Well it may be less intelligent in specific domains like vision. But so what, no one claims that blind humans are less intelligent. It would still need to have the same general intelligence as humans possess.

That's a fallacious comparison. Blind people still have all the "hardware" for visual processing. It does add to their brainpower. They just use the same "circuits" for different purposes - case in point, only recently I think I saw this article on HN, http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/09/19/49459360...

I don't deny that or see how it's relevant.

You're missing the point. Blind people still devote a lot of computation to sensing their local environment or mapping the places they live in.

The narrow AI could literally only operate in the domain of computer programs, optimizations, and mathematical theorems. It could sidestep much of the work that goes into dealing with the messy world and all the details that come with it.

It only has to be stronger than us in the field of building AIs (which isn't an area evolution shaped us to excel in). Same as chess engines beat us as chess while being dumb as doorknobs. Obviously chess heuristics is much simpler than building a high-level AI. But it's a matter of orders of magnitude - at the end of the day, it's still some sort of a narrow, technical task.

Chess doesn't require general intelligence. AI research absolutely does.

That simply moves the problem. An agent such as AIXI if it worked would start by upgrading itself to beyond what its original programmers were able to design.

Human teachers don't have to be better in every way or even more "generally intelligent" that a student in order to be helpful. Perhaps specialization of a seed AI can help breed a general purpose AIs?

Well yes it kind of does move the problem, but it moves it in an interesting direction, because it pushes it to become a self-solving problem.

The important difference is that with this approach, we could never actually get to understand how powerful AI is "really" made, as we would be isolated from it by too many levels of abstraction.

Same as currently we train deep neural networks, and we get them to work (eg. for image recognition), but we don't really know - nor care - what rules and algorithms they developed for themselves under the hoods.

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