AI does not experience fatigue or distractions => consistent performance.
AI can scale its processing power significantly, despite the challenges associated with it (I understand the challenges)
AI can ingest and process new information at an extraordinary speed.
AIs can rewrite themselves
AIs can be multiplicated (solving scarcity of intelligence in manufacturing)
Once achieving AGI, progress could compound rapidly, for better or worse, due to the above points.A model that is as good as an average human but costs $10 000 per effective manhour to run is not very useful, but it is still an AGI.
Geohot (https://geohot.github.io/blog/) estimates that a human brain equivalent requires 20 PFLOPS. Current top-of-the-line GPUs are around 2 PFLOPS and consume up to 500W. Scaling that linearly results in 5kW, which translates to approximately 3 EUR per hour if I calculate correctly.