This begs the question, why then do AI companies have these insane valuations? Do investorsknow something that we don't?
I just don't see how this doesn't get commoditized in the end unless hardware progress just halts. I get that a true AGI would have immeasurable value even if it's not valuable to end users. So the business model might change from charging $xxx/month for access to a chat bot to something else (maybe charging millions or billions of dollars to companies in the medical and technology sector for automated R&D). But even if one company gets AGI and then unleashes it on creating ever more advanced models, I don't see that being an advantage for the long term because the AGI will still be bottlenecked by physical hardware (the speed of a single GPU, the total number of GPUs the AGI's owner can acquire, even the number of data centers they can build). That will give the competition time to catch up and build their own AGI. So I don't see the end of AGI race being the point where the winner gets all the spoils.
And then eventually there will be AGI capable open weight models that are runnable on cheap hardware.
The only way the current state can continue is if there is always strong demand for ever increasingly intelligent models forever and always with no regard for their cost (both monetarily and environmentally). Maybe there is. Like maybe you can't build and maintain a dyson sphere (or whatever sufficiently advanced technology) with just an Einstein equivalent AGI. Maybe you need an AGI that is 1000x more intelligent than Einstein and so there is always a buyer.
Running the inference might commoditize. But the dataset required and the hardware+time+know-how isn't easy to replicate.
It's not like someone can just show up and train a competitive model without investing millions.
They are speculating. If they are any good, then they do it with an acceptable risk profile.
