That’s the point of venture capital; making extremely risky bets spread across a wide portfolio in the hopes of hitting the power law lottery with 1-3 winners.
Most funds will not beat the S&P 500, but again, that’s the point. Risk and reward are intrinsically linked.
In fact, due to the diversification effects of uncorrelated assets in a portfolio (see MPT), even if a fund only delivers 5% returns YoY after fees, that can be a great outcome for investors. A 5% return uncorrelated to bonds and public stocks is an extremely valuable financial product.
It’s clear that humans find LLMs valuable. What companies will end up capturing a lot of that value by delivering the most useful products is still unknown. Betting on one of the biggest names in the space is not a stupid idea (given the purpose of VC investment) until it actually proves itself to be in the real world.
By contrast, SSI doesn't have the technology. The question is whether they'll be able to invent it or not.
Really? Selling goods online (Amazon) is not AGI. It didn’t take a huge leap to think that bookstores on the web could scale. Nobody knew if it would be Amazon to pull it off, sure, but I mean ostensibly why not? (Yes, yes hindsight being what it is…)
Apple — yeah the personal computer nobody fathomed but the immediate business use case for empowering accountants maybe should have been an easy logical next step. Probably why Microsoft scooped the makers of Excel so quickly.
Google? Organizing the world’s data and making it searchable a la the phone book and then (maybe they didn’t think of that maybe Wall Street forced them to) monetizing their platform and all the eyeballs is just an ad play scaled insanely thanks to the internet.
I dunno. I just think AGI is unlike the previous examples so many steps into the future compared to the examples that it truly seems unlikely even if the payoff is basically infinity.
There are innumerable ways to increase your risk without increasing your potential reward.