My question is this - once you achieve AGI, what moat do you have, purely on the scientific part? Other than making the AGI even more intelligent. I see a lot of talk that the first company that achieves AGI, will also achieve market dominance. All other players will crumble. But surely when someone achieves AGI, their competitors will in all likelihood be following closely after. And once those achieve AGI, academia…
That is the moat. That, and training data.
Even today, compute and data are the only things that matter. There is hardly any secret software sauce. This means that only large corporations with a practically infinite amount of resources to throw at the problem could potentially achieve AGI. Other corporations would soon follow, of course, but the landscape would be similar to what it is today.
This is all assuming that the current approaches can take us there, of which I'm highly skeptical. But if there's a breakthrough at some point, we would still see AI tightly controlled by large corporations that offer it as a (very expensive) service. Open source/weight alternatives would not be able to compete, just like they don't today. Inference would still require large amounts of compute only accessible to companies, at least for a few years. The technology would be truly accessible to everyone only once the required compute becomes a commodity, and we're far away from that.
If none of this comes to pass, I suspect there will be an industry-wide crash, and after a few years in the Trough of Disillusionment, the technology would re-emerge with practical applications that will benefit us in much more concrete and subtle ways. Oh, but it will ruin all our media and communication channels regardless, directly causing social unrest and political regression, that much is certain. (: