You're pointing out that groups/institutions/cultures/civilizations are examples of recursively self-improving entities, but the original point was about a recursively self-improving individual intelligent entity.
Well, to the extent that a human-level intelligence is an individual, anyway. We ourselves are probably a mixture-of-experts in some sense.
An individual human starts out a mewling baby and can end up a maxillofacial surgeon through at least partial examples of recursive self-improvement. Learn to walk, talk, read, write, structure, argue, essay, study, cite etc all the way through to the end, with what you previously learned allowing you to learn even more. There's a huge amount of outside help, but at least some of it is also self-improvement.
Also, for the purposes of talking about the phenomenon of recursive self-improvement, individual vs society isn't the end of analysis. Part of the reason AI recursive self-improvement is concerning is that people are worried about it happening on much faster than societal timescales, in ways that are not socially tractable like human societies are (e.g. if our society is "improving" in a way we don't like, we or other humans can intervene to prevent, alter, or mitigate it). It's also important to note that when we're talking about "recursive self-improvement" when it comes to AI, the "self" is not a single software artifact like Llama-70B. The "self" is AI in general, and the most common proposed mechanism is that an AI is better than us at designing and building AIs, and the resulting AI it makes us even better at designing and building AIs.
Well, to the extent that a human-level intelligence is an individual, anyway. We ourselves are probably a mixture-of-experts in some sense.