The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears

The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears:
"I've bolded that last quote because it's key.
Vinge envisions a situation where the first smarter-than-human intelligence can make an even smarter entity in less time than it took to create itself. 
And that this keeps continuing, at each stage, with each iteration growing shorter, until we're down to AIs that are so hyper-intelligent that they make even smarter versions of themselves in less than a second, or less than a millisecond, or less than a microsecond, or whatever tiny fraction of time you want.

This is the so-called 'hard takeoff' scenario, also called the FOOM model by some in the singularity world. It's the scenario where in a blink of an AI, a 'godlike' intelligence bootstraps into being, either by upgrading itself or by being created by successive generations of ancestor AIs."