Web3 on the other hand, none of that. I think it was some sort of crypto scam spinoff.
Re. economics, I think AI will develop a bit like in the movies but hopefully not Terminator 2.
So the whole thing hinges on, at some point in the near future--before the music stops--one of these institutions making a huge breakthrough and discovering AI. But there's no indication we're any closer to that breakthrough now than we were 10, 20, 30, or 50 years ago. They sure do have a lot of compute at their disposal, but there's no clear engineering plan to use it to scale up AI.
If this was a proven technology, there would be a clear path towards making it work. Advancing its industrial applications would be an engineering problem, not a science problem. AI is still science fiction (or at best a speculative theoretical research topic). That's not something sensible people throw money at, unless they've been scammed.