All the frontier houses know this too. They also know it will be extremely difficult to raise more capital if their pitch is "we need to go back to research, which might return nothing at all."

Ilya did also acknowledge that these houses will still generate gobs of revenue, despite being at a dead end, so I'm not sure what the criticism is, exactly.

Everyone knows another breakthrough is required for agi to arrive; sama explicitly said this. Do you wait and sit on your hands until that breakthrough arrives? Or make a lot of money while skating to where the puck will be?