It depends on the scaling nature of the problem being researched. If it's one like the '9 months to make a baby' issue, then you can't really reduce the minimum time. On the other hand if it's studying bacteria with a fast breeding rate, then expanding to hundreds of thousands of AI Petrie dishes is apt to rapidly accelerate the study of the problem.
OK, but for a rapidly emerging super intelligence to occur, it seems like all of the relevant problems would need to be of that second type, and that's far from obviously true, and I would argue is much more likely to not be true.
