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How will these investors get their money. The AI companies either have a competitor invent AGI which means all other AI companies are worth nothing or they themselves invent AGI in which case a whole bunch of companies go broke including the investors themselves.

This money isn’t never going to be returned

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A few of these, likely openai and anthropic, will IPO, and the early stage investors will get their cash back then. Others will crash, maybe also openai and anthropic. Other investors in smaller firms may get cash back when the companies are swallowed up by Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, etc., when the Great and Inevitable Consolidation occurs. I think short term there's a ton of money to be made by investing in these companies. In the long run I don't see how they survive, since nobody in the big leagues has a real technological advantage over anybody else so stiff competition will keep prices low. Even if they cartelize, a startup could beat them on price since there's not much preventing anyone with enough capital from building their own "frontier" models now, except GPU shortages... Talent of course, but there's plenty of smart people out there who would take a big paycheck to do it.

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