No, other people will generate technologies like quantum computing, fusion energy. Big AI companies will try to own (by buying them out) as much of these as possible because the current model of AI they are using requires these techs to be able to deliver anything significantly better than what they have now. So these tech advancements will basically be owned by AI companies leaving very little room for other uses.
For these AI companies trying to go toward general AI is risky, as you said above it is not even well defined. On the other hand scaling up their models massively is a well defined goal which however requires major compute and energy innovations like those mentioned above. If these ever happen during like the next ten years or so big tech involved in AI will jump on these and buy as much of it as possible for themselves. And the rest will be mostly bought by governments for military and security applications leaving very little for other public betterment uses.
General AI is a good goal for them because its poorly defined not in spite of it.
Grifts usually do have vague and shifting goal lines. See star citizen and the parallels between its supporters/detractors vs the same groups with AI: essentially if you personally enjoy/benefit from the system, you will overlook the negatives.
People are a selfish bunch and once they get a fancy new tool and receive praise for it, they will resist anyone telling them otherwise so they can keep their new tool, and the status they think it gives them (i.e. expert programmer, person who writes elegant emails, person who can create moving art, etc.)
AI is a magic trick to me, everyone thinks they see one thing, but really if you showed them how it works they would say, "well that's not real magic after all, is it?"
Idiots thinking a new thing is magic that will solve all the worlds problems doesn't mean the thing doesn't have merit. Someone calling themselves an exper carpenter because they have a nailgun doesn't make nailguns any less useful.
If you see a person doing a data entry job, do you walk over to them, crack their head open and say "aww man, it's not magic, it's just a blob of fat capable of reading and understanding a document, and to then plot the values into a spreadsheet"?
It's not magic, it's not a super intelligence that will solve everything, it's the first tool we've been able to make that can be told what to do in human language, and able to then perform tasks with a degree of intelligence and critical thinking, something that normally would require either a human or potentially years of development to automate programmatically. That alone makes it very useful
What if i say big fusion companies will take over the ai market since they have the energy to train better models, seems exactly as likely.
Remember when GPUs stopped being available because openAI bought nvidia and AMD and took all the gpus for themselves?
No? Weird, since gpus are needed for them to be able to deliver anything significantly better than what we have now 🤔
I guess the end result would be the same. But at large the economic system and human nature would be to blame which is actually what I am trying to blame here too, not AI but people in power who abuse AI and steer it towards hype and profit