[cshimmin]

I'm pretty sure "our best minds" aren't the ones building the ape avatars. They are working on the fundamental advancements of AI itself. Once those tools are built, it doesn't take nearly as much "best brains" to tweak them for specific applications.

In other words, you can just think of all these things (cash grabs and otherwise) as an effect of the rapid advancements in AI, in this case manifesting as a growth area of economic activity. As another poster said, others are working on medical applications, climate models, etc. It's not a zero-sum game on the application side.