The valuation is based on one lab getting a decisive first advantage, and turning that into a durable self-improving advantage that can never be caught up to. If any can pull it off (a gigantic if), they will effectively own most AI value, and the people who own their shares will live happily ever after. Divide your investment between the labs that could plausibly do this, and your EV may not be dreadful.

This is clearly not how it's going though. Any advancement from any lab has been quickly (< 6 months) matched up by basically everybody else. Even Grok nowadays is decent, and that's something. When something like you've described actually happened historically you generally had quite fast a clear frontrunner and a bunch of copycats that failed miserably; in 2026 we are very far from that. we are heading face-first into towards a pricing war because all models are easily interchangeable nowadays - AI is turning into a commodity more or less

And then you wake up from the dream…