Google DeepMind engineer Haydn Belfield says there is no measurable acceleration of AI research driven by AI itself, and self-improving AI remains far off. Automation is already substantial: AI writes over 75 percent of production code, about 88 percent of code changes still need human oversight or review, and fully delegated changes rose from 7.5 to 11.9 percent. Across 1,389 internal Argon agent runs, success without human input dropped sharply as complexity grew, and on the in-house RE-Bench of 74 realistic ML engineering tasks, Argon solves about half versus 27 percent for Gemini 3.7 Flash. A General Capability Index covering 123 models and 92 benchmarks shows Gemini capabilities growing about 0.1 GCI points per month with no significant acceleration; Gemini 4 Argon sits slightly above the trend line, which the team attributes to compute and organizational investment. Belfield rates AI-driven research automation risk as low but is building measurement infrastructure, while over 20 researchers, including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and OpenAI's Jakub Pachocki, warn of a possible intelligence explosion.