There is endless returns to frontier intelligence, just because most people can't make use of it doesn't mean someone can't make a ton of money off of it.

Most software engineers will just need cheap tokens.

But things like physics and drug discovery have no foreseeable upper bound.

Or governance of large organizations... There are a huge number of factors to consider, counterfactuals, studies, lots of non-obvious second and third order effects, etc. We're barely able to get basic governance without creating huge problems (low density zoning rubber stamped across the nation creating a housing crisis, for example), so the bar isn't high.

We pay CEOs an enormous amount because a small improvement in performance of an org because of them can make a massive difference in organizational value.

The upper bound is limited by market size and cost of intelligence.

Throwing more intelligence at a problem doesn’t necessarily pan out financially otherwise we wouldn’t have single underemployed biology PhD.