The AI singularity, while the assumption is often that it will be smarter "per entity" does not really require individual AI entities to get smarter than a human, as long as we assume that human level intelligence continues to scale if you speed them up and increase the number of entities working together. In that case we could still get the singularity "just" by getting to a level where an AI can optimize its performance and resource use so that it eventually beats us on sheer number of "human-brain-second-equivalents" dedicated to improvement at any moment.
