> You should at least try to explain your contrarian position

FWIW I explained it fully and provided the argument, along with explicit grounding examples. Can you tell me what exactly you don't understand?

To quote your other post:

> This is the weakest part of the argument. Absolutely no reason to believe the second inventor will be 10x faster.

Nor is there any reason to believe that it will work at any usable speed. An LLM capable of AGI running at 0.000001tok/s isn't a very good head start. Nor is it a good moat if it can't actually realize anything material fast enough. Lord knows America has labor problems.

I'm demonstrating the context is a lot more complicated than "be first". There are innumerable specific examples. They're not guaranteed to happen, that's not the point being made.

Also "no reason" is curious when it's the explicit pattern this exact industry has exhibited. Chinese models lag a few months, and come in swinging with an order of magnitude more efficiency. Does it apply? Who can say. It's certainly on the table. Pretending like it's any more ridiculous than AGI itself is irrational.

> Does this ever happen? Even in traditional manufacturing, the second “inventor” starts behind and has to improve their own process to surpass the first.

To use the industry itself once again: Japan was the first to deep learning. Performance issues prevented them from capitalizing on it. Now they're barely even a player on the field. Interestingly and adjacent to the industry, Japan was second to symbolic AI, and the FGCS was lightyears ahead of America's crufty Lisp ecosystem. For a more modern example, Google was the first to transformers. Much of this revolution is thanks to them. A shame that Gemini is third-rate at best.

It's not unique to this industry. That second inventor more often than not does a better job than the original one. It's a pretty common pattern. Otherwise, we wouldn't need patents.

My "contrarian position" is anything but. There is nothing new under the sun. You don't just need to be first, you need to maintain exclusivity.