The underlying story from TechCrunch AI highlights a critical, often overlooked dependency in this line of research: the automated system only works insofar as the benchmarks perfectly reflect the actual alignment goals. This is the fundamental catch. Creating and maintaining those perfect benchmarks is arguably a harder problem than the alignment work itself, and it remains a deeply human task.
Therefore, the prospect of human researchers becoming obsolete appears overstated for the foreseeable future. The real near-term impact may be more mundane: a potential reduction in the cost of running certain iterative training experiments, shifting researcher time from implementation to higher-level problem definition and benchmark design.