They don't have to spend $500B to compete. Their costs should be much lower.

That said, I don't think they have the courage to invest even the lower amount that it would take to compete with this. But it's not clear if it's truly necessary either, as DeepSeek is proving that you don't need a billion to get to the frontier. For all we know we might all be running AGI locally on our gaming PCs in a few years' time. I'm glad I'm not the one writing the checks here.

Over what time frame? They could easily spend that much over the next 5 to 10 years without outside investment (and they probably will).

TFA says $100 billion. The $500 is maybe, eventually.

Probably not popular opinion - but I actually think Google is winning this now. Deep research is the most useful AI product I have used (Claud is significantly more useful than openAI)