6 months will be an impossible gap once the thing starts closed loop self improvement
Unless the first real AGI AI kills us all to preemptively weed out its own competition (possible, but a bad business model, economically speaking) there is not any defined end-point, so in the long run what does it matter if the various factions pushing this stuff hit the closed loop self improvement point at different times...?
If the rest can similarly "blast-off" X months later than the frontrunner (and I see no reason why they wouldn't as none of these frontier labs have managed to pull ahead and maintain a lead for very long) the first mover is still only X months ahead of the others even if the gap between capabilities is briefly increased by a lot.
If there is an endgoal/endstate, or finite resources being competed for, then a lead can start compounding and extend itself.
Don't sleep on what AGI means for every robot that already exists. It's not hardware holding robotics back from factory work right now, it is only software.
If you are the first to tap key supply chains, and the first to create key supply chains, then you are first in line to finite resources, which would then have less available for those that follow months behind.
> AI programs have almost zero connection to the real world.
Tell that to every logistics program. Even if humans must go to work, efficiency is multiplied by proper logistics, which AGI enables at scale across all domains.
And this is just the low hanging fruit explanation.