They are unrelated. All you need is a way for continual improvement without plateauing, and this can start at any level of intelligence. As it did for us; humans were once less intelligent.
Using the flagship to bootstrap the next iteration with synthetic data is standard practice now. This was mentioned in the GPT5 presentation. At the rate things are going I think this will get us to ASI, and it's not going to feel epochal for people who have interacted with existing models, but more of the same. After all, the existing models are already smarter than most humans and most people are taking it in their stride.
The next revolution is going to be embodiment. I hope we have the commonsense to stop there, before instilling agency.
