I would not minimize the extent to which AI progress depends on things like the effort that goes into training material acquisition and data labeling. In those areas, improvement is a direct function of how much you invest.

I wonder how much spending is motivated by the phenomenon of sudden emergent performance in LLMs. Clearly some people who are smarter than me expect something like emergent AGI, or at least they think the odds justify spending whatever it takes to see if that would happen.

That leaves a lot of room for efficient aggressive followers.