In the Star Trek/Culture/Commonwealth equally distributed, benevolent AI, sure. In the I’ve-got-mine reality, I assume only the select few can speak with the AI and use it to control the serfs.

I mean, it isn't a bad plan for VCs. Never said it's a good plan for us peasants. My opinion of sama is 'selling utopia, implementing dystopia' and that's assuming he's playing clean, which he obviously isn't.

As for a post-money world, if AGI can do every economically viable thing better than any human, the rational economic agent will at the very least let go all humans from all jobs.

There's no future where OpenAI makes everyone else a "serf" though. In 1948 certain Americans imagined that the US could rule the Earth because it got the atomic bomb first, and they naively imagined that other countries would take a generation to catch up. In reality the USSR had its own atomic bomb by 1949.

That's what the competition with OpenAI looks like to me. There are at least three other American companies with near-peer models plus strong open-weights models coming from multiple countries. No single institution or country is going to end up with a ruling-the-Earth lead in AI.

In many ways the USA does rule the earth now. The Grand Area is big.

With AI, I think there is extremely strong power laws that benefit the top performing models. The best model can attract the most users, which then attracts the most capital, most data, and best researchers to make an even better model.

So while there is no hard moat, one only needs to hold the pole position until the competition runs out of money.

Also, even if no single AI company will rule the earth, if AI turns out to be useful, the AI companies might get a chunk of the profits from the additional usefulness. If the usefulness is sufficiently large, the chunk doesn't have to be large percentually to be large in absolute terms.

I am not thinking some better LLM, but a genuine AI capable of original thought. Vastly superior capabilities to a human. A super intelligence which could silently sabotage competitor systems preventing the key breakthrough to make their own AI. One which could manipulate markets, hack every system, design Terminator robots, etc

Fanciful, yes, but that is the AI fantasy.

America not using its nuclear advantage to secure its nuclear advantage doesn’t mean it couldn’t have.