>On the other hand, if you're telling your investors that AGI is about two years away, then you can only do that for a few years.

Musk has been doing this with autonomous driving since 2015. Machine learning has enough hype surrounding it that you have to embellish to keep up with every other company's ridiculous claims.

I doubt this was the main driver for the investors. People were buying Tesla even without it.

Whether there is hype or not, the laws of money remain the same. If you invest and don’t get expected returns, you will be eventually concerned and will do something about it.