There is a huge range from slightly smarter than human AI vs the kind of &#x27;magic&#x27; AI it would take to make the singularity happen.  An AI that&#x27;s 10% smarter than any human would probably not be that noticeable outside of testing, as it&#x27;s not obvious who the smartest person in a room is. And it would take a decade of study to catch up to the cutting edge on just one field.  10x that and your doubling the rate of progress that a single person was making, but that&#x27;s not really going to change much.<p>Suppose we develop an AI that&#x27;s 100x better than that, or 10 times as fast as any person as in they can do in 1 hour what it would take a highly trained and educated person 10 hours to do.  Well, after a year or two they could probably be roughly as capable as a really good 20 person team due to lower communication overhead, but adding one more 20 person team is not going to change the world much.  A million of them, might double the rate that the world progresses, but that&#x27;s both a long time coming and probably not going to change things much.<p>To really get the singularity type progress, you need an AI that can make it&#x27;s self smarter though better software and hardware, which seem like a far harder problem than just building a working AI.  After all what if the first thousand just want to sit around and read Fan-fiction all day.