Right now, we have a world in which the primary bottleneck in AI development is human effort and time. Insofar as compute and hardware are bottlenecks, they are mostly so because the process of making chips is bottlenecked by the human involvement that's required along the supply chain. Automation of tasks relevant to AI research is currently mostly complementary to human labour, rather than substitutory. This means AI developments don't much affect the speed at which future AI is developed and speedups mainly come from humans scaling up investment into AI progress.