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IMO, this is still the operating assumption of the AI race. It is also the only thing which justifies the intensity of the efforts expended by various AI companies.
Normally, when a new field of tech is breached, there is no decisive first-mover advantage, where a technological lead of a year will translate into long-term dominance. History is full of cases (e.g. early home computers (e.g. Apple Macintosh), dot-com boom (e.g. myspace), photovoltaic (e.g. German companies), browser wars) where the forerunners became footnotes in history.
But what OpenAI investors buy is not so much future profits if OpenAI replaces most of the work force, but an investment-proportional solid angle of the light cone if Altman achieves aligned superintelligence (and remains aligned to his investors himself). The presumption is clearly that whoever finishes climbing the rope first will then cut the rope to prevent anyone else from following.
Many OpenAI investors don't believe in the singularity. Microsoft is demanding revenue-share from OpenAI right now. They see the power of the technology and naturally decide to invest in it, even if they're unpersuaded on mass automation or singularity. They want it to sell more subscriptions, speed up software development. It's the myopic facebook mindset of 'this technology could sell us so many short-form video ads' and tbf, that is true. AI is making huge amounts of profit for Facebook right now. Tiktok makes enormous amounts of money (in China) based off its algorithms which include LLM tech. AI is highly profitable right now and it is a sure bet that there will be further highly profitable offshoots from LLM technology, besides the singularity. They just require lots of investment to tap and we are still in an early-growth phase of a new market, whereas video is a lot more mature.
Older versions of Claude Sonnet could easily snipe redditors per the /r/changemyview experiments, obviously AI can make huge amounts of money for businesses.
OpenAI is valued at a mere $500-830 billion. The market cap of gold and silver is about $35 trillion. If OpenAI valuations were genuinely driven by belief in the singularity, it'd be worth a lot more than shiny rocks! The lightcone contains a hell of a lot of gold, a company with singularity-pilled investors would get everything money can buy even if they are just one of a few leading competitors.
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