There are tasks that people will easily pay hundreds or thousands of dollars per pop.

And maybe that's how all of it is going to evolve in the future – so you pay per solution, not tokens?

Diminishing returns would catch you there as well.

Perhaps, it's a bit like being a super smart person in contemporary society: at some point, being smarter doesn't really reliably translate into a better life.

When you learn from available human data, those text books max out at some point. You cannot learn what isn't there.