Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

My question is this - once you achieve AGI, what moat do you have, purely on the scientific part? Other than making the AGI even more intelligent.

I see a lot of talk that the first company that achieves AGI, will also achieve market dominance. All other players will crumble. But surely when someone achieves AGI, their competitors will in all likelihood be following closely after. And once those achieve AGI, academia will follow.

Point is, at some point AGI itself will become available the everyone. The only things that will be out of reach for most, is compute - and probably other expensive things on the infrastructure part.

Current AI funding seems to revolve around some sort of winner-take-all scenario. Just keep throwing incredible amounts of money at it, and hope that you've picked the winner. I'm just wondering what the outcome will be if this thesis turns out wrong.

Same thing that happened to pets.com or webvan.com and the rest of the graveyard of failed companies. A bunch of investors lose money, a bunch of market consolidation, employees get dilluted to worthlessness, chapter 7, chapter 11. The free ride of today's equivalent of $1 Ubers will end. A glut of previously very expensive hardware for cheap on eBay (though I doubt this last point will happen since AGI is likely to be compute intensive).

It's not going to be fun or easy, but as far as the financials go, we were there in 2001.

The question is assuming we do get AGI, what the ramifications of that will be. Instead of hiring employees, a business can spin up employees (and down) like a tech company can spin up EC2 instances. Great for employers, terrible for employees.

That's a big "if" though.

> The only things that will be out of reach for most, is compute - and probably other expensive things on the infrastructure part.

That is the moat. That, and training data.

Even today, compute and data are the only things that matter. There is hardly any secret software sauce. This means that only large corporations with a practically infinite amount of resources to throw at the problem could potentially achieve AGI. Other corporations would soon follow, of course, but the landscape would be similar to what it is today.

This is all assuming that the current approaches can take us there, of which I'm highly skeptical. But if there's a breakthrough at some point, we would still see AI tightly controlled by large corporations that offer it as a (very expensive) service. Open source/weight alternatives would not be able to compete, just like they don't today. Inference would still require large amounts of compute only accessible to companies, at least for a few years. The technology would be truly accessible to everyone only once the required compute becomes a commodity, and we're far away from that.

If none of this comes to pass, I suspect there will be an industry-wide crash, and after a few years in the Trough of Disillusionment, the technology would re-emerge with practical applications that will benefit us in much more concrete and subtle ways. Oh, but it will ruin all our media and communication channels regardless, directly causing social unrest and political regression, that much is certain. (:

I think if any of this becomes possible, it won't happen. Seriously, if AGI was truly on the horizon at openai or elsewhere, the first thing they'd do is shut it down. Once it's AGI, they would have to realize that they can't control it any more than anyone else can, and facing the reality of that would stop them in their tracks.

In a way, all the hype can only indicate that AGI is still a distant illusion. If it were really around the corner we'd be hearing different stories.