OK, so absolutely good faith here what is the end game?
Obviously, there’s a scenario of super power AI and then it’s a matter of continuing course. Electricity and silicon.
What if you are right, and the scaling doesn’t work. It is too much power, time, hardware to improve… does openAI fold?
Do they just actual use the models they have?
Does everyone just decide that AI didn’t work and go back 5 years like it didn’t happen?
Does the price change so that they have to be profitable making AI services expensive and rare instead of today where they are everywhere pointlessly?
Or does this insane valuation only make sense with information you don’t have like insider scaling or efficiency news?
Does China’s strategy of undercutting US value of models pay off bigly?
Why so extreme, most likely just AI winter for a while, then when tech and societies has caught up, the advancements begins again.
It is not like we threw away the dotcom advances, they were just put on hold for a while..
The people running these companies have a perverse incentive to keep the ball rolling as long as possible so that they can extricate as much personal wealth and influence as possible. Maybe AGI makes all the problems go away. But, failing that, they get out relatively scot-free when it all collapses. And they don't owe anything to the public. And no one is going to bring them up on fraud charges or any other kind of criminal charges. So, while the world is burning around them (including their former companies), they have the money and connections to acquire property and businesses that are actually productive. It's the Russian oligarch playbook. They're the kings of a struggling society on the brink of failure, but they heard "kings" and said, "Let's go."