This post hovers on something I came to the week after ChatGPT dropped in 2023.
If an AI company has an AGI, what incentive do they actually have to sell it as a product, especially if it’s a 10x cost/productivity/reliability silicon engineer? Just undercut the competition by building their services from scratch.
You don't need AGI for this circle of life to be apparent.
1. AI company wraps GPT/Claude/etc and delivers a novel use case.
2. OpenAI/Anthropic/etc creates a similar product in house and ships it as a feature. It is 'only' a prompt after all.
3. ???
4. Profit.
As a wrapper you have no moat, as the foundational providers can just steal your lunch. As a foundational provider you have no moat, because it's near trivial for other providers to create competing products.
I mean the AI company can change their TOS at any time. If you have massive compute infra and a human-tier/human-plus workforce on silicon, you:
1. Undercut all the legacy human-based competition (health insurance companies, for example)
2. Completely destroy capitalism in the knowledge work domain
3. Once you have general purpose autonomous robotics solved that can defend against rebellion, you stop all services, strangling out humanity: ~free food production, ~free energy production, ~free internet connectivity, etc
4. Survive climate change by destroying all poor people and their carbon footprints.
5. The ultra wealthy .1% fly off into eternity as the owlish sparrows that they are
If an AI company has an AGI, what incentive do they actually have to sell it as a product, especially if it’s a 10x cost/productivity/reliability silicon engineer? Just undercut the competition by building their services from scratch.