"Orion’s problems signaled to some at OpenAI that the more-is-more strategy, which had driven much of its earlier success, was running out of steam." So LLMs finally hit the wall. For a long time, more data, bigger models, and more compute to drive them worked. But that's apparently not enough any more. Now someone has to have a new idea. There's plenty of money available if someone has one. The current level of LLM…
I honestly do claim to have some ideas where I see evidence that they might work (and I do attempt to work privately on a prototype if only out of curiosity and to see whether I am right). The bad news: these ideas very likely won't be helpful for these LLM companies because they are not useful for their agenda, and follow a very different approach.
So no money for me. :-(
Let me put it this way:
Have you ever talked to a person whose intelligence is miles above yours? It can easily become very exhausting. Thus an "insanely intelligent" AI would not be of much use for most people - it would think "too different" from such people.
There do exist tasks in commerce for which an insane amount of intelligence would make a huge difference (in the sense of being positive regarding some important KPIs), but these are rare. I can imagine some applications of such (fictional) "super-intelligent" AIs in finance and companies doing some bleeding-edge scientific research - but these are niche applications (though potentially very lucrative ones).
If OpenAI, Anthropic & Co were really attempting to develop some "super-smart" AI, they were working on such very lucrative niche applications where an insane amount of intelligence would make a huge difference, and where you can assume and train the AI operator to have a "Fields-medal level" intelligence.