A couple of thoughts on this topic:<p>* Whether the source code to advanced AI is open may have some importance, but what determines whether some individual or corporation will be able to run advanced AI is whether they can afford the <i>hardware</i>.  I can download some open-source code and run it on my laptop - but Google has data centres with 10s or 100s of thousands of computers.  The big corporations are much more likely to have&#x2F;control the advanced AI because they have the resources for the needed hardware.<p>* Soft &#x2F; hard takeoff - 
I think a lot of people miss that any &#x27;hard takeoffs&#x27; will be limited by the amount of hardware that can be allocated to an AI.
Let us imagine that we have created an AI that can reach human level intelligence, and it requires a data centre with 10000 computers to run it.  Just because the AI has reached human level intelligence doesn&#x27;t mean that the AI will magically get smarter and smarter and become &#x27;unto a God&#x27; to us.  If it wants to get 2x smarter, it will probably require 2x (or more) computers.  The exact ratio depends on the equation of &#x27;achieved intelligence&#x27; vs hardware requirements, and also on the unknown factor of algorithmic improvements.  I think that algorithmic improvements will have diminishing returns.  Even if the AI is able to improve its own algorithms by say 2x, it&#x27;s unlikely that will allow it to transition from human level to &#x27;god-level&#x27; AI.  I think hardware resources allocated will still be the major factor.
So an AI isn&#x27;t likely to get a lot smarter in a subtle, hidden way, or in an explosive way.  More likely it will be something like &#x27;we spent another 100M dollars on our new data centre, and now the AI is 50% smarter!&#x27;.