> Do you think that human civilization has a finite demand for intelligence?

No, I don't. But for any given task there is a ceiling above which for that task there is no value in additional intelligence. E.g. it takes very little intelligence (none, in fact) to sort a list. More intelligence does not result in a more sorted list.

And so for a huge proportion of what we do there is a ceiling of value that can be extracted by selling AI tools to do any given task.

Combine that with there being at any given time a ceiling of available capital to be apportioned to buy intelligence to carry out the remaining tasks, and the floor of tasks that non-frontier models can do well enough rising, and there will at any given time be a finite amount of capital that will be accessible to frontier models.

It is by no means given that that slice of capital will grow rapidly enough for frontier providers to be able to create an attractive financial return. That depends on frontier labs being able to continue to deliver sufficiently more value than cheaper models at any given time that enough people won't simply wait.

I'm extremely bullish on AI in terms of its ability to transform society over time, but that does not automatically translate into assuming that the current frontier labs are a safe investment bet.