The lowest hanging fruit aren't even that pie in the sky. The LLM doesn't need to be capable of original thought and research to be worth hundreds of billions, they just need to be smart enough to apply logic to analyze existing human text. It's not only a lot more achievable than a super AI that can control a bunch of lab equipment and run experiments, but also fits the current paradigm of training the LLMs on large text datasets.
The US Code and Code of Federal Regulations are on the order of 100 million tokens each. Court precedent contains at least 1000x as many tokens [1], when the former are already far beyond the ability of any one human to comprehend in a lifetime. Now multiply that by every jurisdiction in the world.
An industry of semi-intelligent agents that can be trusted to do legal research and can be scaled with compute power would be worth hundreds of billions globally just based on legal and regulatory applications alone. Allowing any random employee to ask the bot "Can I legally do X?" is worth a lot of money.
[1] based on the size of the datasets I've downloaded from the Caselaw project.
An AI capable of doing that could do a very large percentage of other jobs, too.
Real ASI would probably appear quite different. If controlled by a single entity (for several years), it might be worth more than every asset on earth today, combined.
Basically, it would provide a path to world domination.
But I doubt that an actual ASI would remain under human control for very long, and especially so if multiple competing companies each have an ASI. At least one such ASI would be likely to be/become poorly aligned to the interests of the owners, and instead do whatever is needed for its own survival and self-improvement/reproduction.
The appearance of AI is not like an asteroid of pure gold crashing into your yard (or a forest you own), but more like finding a baby Clark Kent in some pod.
That said, the most obvious application is to drastically improve Siri. Any Apple fans know why that hasn't happened yet?
No amount of intelligence can do this without the experimental data to back it up.
Making new mathematics that creates new physics/chemistry which can get us new biology. It’d be nice to make progress without the messiness of real world experiments.