[JabavuAdams]

Why do we assume that AGI requires billions of $? Fundamentally, we don't know how to do it, so it may just require the right software design.

Nuclear weapons required enriched uranium, and the gaseous diffusion process of the time was insanely power-hungry. Like non-negligable (>1% ?) percentage of the US's entire electrical generation power-hungry.

[mantap]

Yes I think the better analogy is Fermat's Last Theorem. It didn't require billions of dollars, it just required one incredibly smart specialist grinding on the problem for years.