> I don't take 3 as a given. There's just too much going on in the space for one cloistered company to control it all and be in control of it.

Yeah, in my comment, I was assuming the publicly-stated goals of the labs actually came true. I assumed that they achieved true AGI (defined as "about as smart as Fable, except it can manage long-term tasks as well as a smart human, too"), and that this would cause widespread unemployment and fully-automated production. And furthermore, I assumed that once they could use AGI to automate more AI research, they could use that to make even smarter models. The labs call this "recursive self-improvement" (RSI) and like to insist it will happen Real Soon Now.

Given this chain of events come true, then I think there's an excellent chance that the resulting models will never be sold via an API. Given those assumptions, the labs would probably make more money by keeping all the compute to themselves and just ordering the AI to start and manage businesses. Imagine Anthropic having an in-house OpenClaw that could plan and run a successful startup with no human input besides an annual "board meeting" with the humans.

This isn't the only possible outcome, of course.

- Maybe the labs are wrong and progress stalls out well short of superintelligence. This would be nice!

- Maybe true AGI is only requires one or two clever algorithmic tricks beyond what we have now. In this case, training costs might go down, and superhuman models might become widespread. I suspect that possible future would be extra weird.