This concept is very often misinterpreted by these tech CEOs because they’re terrified of becoming the next Yahoo or Kodak or cab company or AskJeeves or name any other company that was replaced by something with more “innovation” (aka venture capital). It’s all great they’ll lose wealth.

The underlying concepts are sound though. Think of a small business like a barber shop or restaurant. Even a very good owner/operator will eventually get old and retire and if they haven’t expanded to train their successor before they do, the business will close. Which is fine, the business served the purpose of making a living for that person. Compare with McDonalds, they expanded and grew so the business could continue past the natural lifetime of a single restaurant.

A different example of stagnation is Kodak. They famously had the chance to grow their business into digital cameras early on, their researchers and engineers were on the cutting edge of that technology. But the executives rejected expansion in favor of sticking with the higher profit margins (at the time) of film cameras. And now they’re basically irrelevant. Expanding on this example, even digital cameras are irrelevant, within 20 years of Kodak’s fall. The market around low- to mid-end stand-alone cameras had disappeared in favor of phones.

So the real lesson is not so much infinite growth like these tech CEOs believe in, the lesson is adaptability to a changing world and changing technology, which costs money in the form of research, development, and risk taking trying to set up production on products you’re not sure will sell, but might replace your current offerings.

Companies aren’t investing to achieve AGI as far as I’m aware, that’s not the end game so I this title is misinformation. Even if AGI was achieved it’d be a happy accident, not the goal.

The goal of all these investments is to convince businesses to replace their employees with AI to the maximum extent possible. They want that payroll money.

The other goal is to cut out all third party websites from advertising revenue. If people only get information through Meta or Google or whatever, they get to control what’s presented. If people just take their AI results at face value and don’t actually click through to other websites, they stay in the ecosystem these corporations control. They get to sell access to the public, even more so than they do now.

That’s because no human is actually reviewing anything on Reddit. It’s all keywords and AI, and they didn’t care how often it gets it wrong as long as they don’t get negative coverage in the news.