I have to admit, of the four, Karpathy and Sutskever were the two I was most impressed with. I hope he goes on to do something great.
When the next wave of new deep learning innovations sweeps the world, Microsoft eats whats left of them. They make lots of money, but don't have future unless they replace what they lost.
If something like Q* is provided organically with GPT5 (which may have a different name), and allows proper planning, error correction and direct interaction with tools, that gaps is getting really close to 0.
A tiny fraction of the current funding. 2-4 orders of magnitude less.
> It's just that fundamental scientific discovery bears little relationship to the pallets of cash
Heavy funding may not automatically lead to breakthroughs such as Special Relativity or Quantum Mechanics (though it helps there too). But once the most basic ideas are in place, massive is what causes the breakthroughs like in the Manhatten Project and Apollo Program.
And it's not only the money itself. It's the attention and all the talent that is pulled in due to that.
And in this case, there is also the fear that the competition will reach AGI first, whether the competition is a company or a foreign government.
It's certainly possible the the ability to monetize the investments may lead to some kind of slowdown at some point (like if there is a recession).
But it seems to me that such a recession will have no more impact on the development of AGI than the dotcom bust had for the importance of the internet.