Stargate is Essentially "Build it and They Will Come"

In a business advancing as rapidly as artificial intelligence, with as much potential to disrupt economies, industries and life itself, forecasting might not help so much. Sometimes, even without explicit business models certainty, participants simply have to invest. The notion of "build it and they will come" has both worked and failed with regards to internet applications and some amount of connectivity infrastructure. 

Sometimes firms "build it" and users do not come. That is to be expected. In fact, failure rates for initiatives that are very "venture capital" style bets should be expected to reach 70 percent. 

To be sure, many of those "failures" will be soft failures: our assets were acquired. But hard failures (bankruptcy) also will happen. 

For would-be leaders of the artificial general intelligence "race," Stargate is a building block, as high-performance computing will be necessary. 

It is rational to point out the dangers of "build it and they will come" as an investment rationale. During the dot com bubble all sorts of silly firms got funded on that basis. But, eventually, some of the new leaders did find that once built, "they did come." 

Contradictory things can be true at the same time: most of the high-performance computing infra initiatives will fail in some way (soft failures more than hard failures). Most large language Models will face the same fate. Many AI use cases and apps likewise will fail to have appreciable benefits. 

But in all these areas, a few firms will succeed wildly as they emerge as leaders of the HPC/AGI  industry. 

Like many others, I can't really flesh out what "AGI" actually means, in terms of capabilities. What is "general intelligence" and how do we measure it? Less hard to defend is the notion that, as we move towards capabilities that might be properties of AGI, some limited number of market leaders will emerge. 

Stargate backers hope they could be among those eventual leaders.