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Large companies are often inflexible and inefficient as a matter of deliberate strategy. I've found myself in scenarios where we have a complete software artifact that a smaller company would launch and find successful, but we can't launch it, because we have to satisfy some expectation we've set or do a complex integration with some important other system of ours.

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A lesson from gamedev is that players will deliberately restrict themselves - sometimes to make the game more fun or challenging, sometimes to appeal to their aesthetic principles.

If/when superhuman AI is achieved, those limitations will all go away. An owner will just give it money and control and tell it to optimize for more money or political power or whatever he wants.

That's a much scarier future than a paperclip maximizer because it's much closer and it doesn't require complete takeover first, it'll be just business as usual, except more somehow more sociopathic.

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