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.