Sure, but: that single human with the intelligence of a top tier engineer of scientist will have immediate access to all human knowledge. Plus, what do you think happens the moment its optimizes itself to run in 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. parallel instances?
Well, A) "top tier engineer/scientist" is a significant step above generic human, B) the human engineers/scientists also have immediate access to the same database, C) The humans have been optimizing it for even longer, so what makes us think the AI can optimize itself even a couple percent?
For example, if the number of AIs you can run per petaflop started to scale with the cube root of researcher-years, then even if your researcher AIs are quite fast and you can double your density in a couple years, hitting 5x will take a decade and hitting 10x will approach half a century.
