My point was that it already was on an exponential trajectory. RL/self-play and the like remove some of the human inputs that were previously required for that

My point was that it already was on an exponential trajectory. RL/self-play and the like remove some of the human inputs that were previously required for that growth. Take the trajectory of chess. handcrafted rules -> policies based on human game statistics -> self-play bootstrapped from human games -> random-initialized self-play.