Improvements in model performance aren't always strictly compute-constrained in a way that makes them reliant on Moore's Law. Open weight models-- in particular, from Chinese labs-- are optimizing model intelligence with less compute. They're "behind" frontier models by months, but as others have noted, it's possible to get Sonnet 4.5+ level performance at reduced cost, today, from open weight labs.
No, I'm not assuming Moore's law. The efficiency of AI datacenters will continue to improve even without Moore's law, but more importantly the efficiency of packing intelligence into gigabytes and FLOPS will improve by leaps and bounds over the coming years, just as it has for the past few years if not faster.
Then you're assuming an efficiency that is analogous to how Moore's law made it efficient for chips. Same difference. The problem is that AI scaling in the longest term is a completely unknown problem.
Training improvements and Moore's Law are "analogous" but not "same difference." They are far from the same thing, governed by completely different factors, and one can happen and has been happening independently from the other.
Well I never said nor meant that, rather, my third (3) sentence should've hinted that I already believe what you are saying in your second sentence (2). Whereas my second (2) sentence was handwaving at the notion that if the parent commenter's remark (about improvment trends) were to be assumed then the rational argument must be subject to the same standards, ergo same difference (in argument standards). (Also I use a phone, please excuse any confusion due to not spelling out my online opinions in full)
To clarify another way, it seems the parent commenter and obviously many, many lay people seem to think ALL sorts of technology improves eventually and are always very assured of that. That's a common mistaken premise or axiom used in their arguments. (Arguably Moore's law (up until now) has been a factor in confounding this observation because so much other tech has historically benefited from it directly or indirectly)
Sorry, but a plain reading of your comment does not imply at all that you agree with me, rather the opposite. I'm not basing my opinion on any mistaken axiom of inevitable technology improvement, of course. I'm projecting obvious trends of the past few years which are overwhelmingly likely to continue in the medium term.
"Same difference" could only mean that you believe my argument should fail in the same way as an argument based on Moore's law. If that's not what you meant then you should have used different words. If that is what you meant, with the justification that "AI scaling in the longest term is a completely unknown problem", I disagree with that too.
In the "longest term" the ultimate scaling of AI doesn't matter for the original question of whether "AGI will most likely only be for the rich". Nobody looks at the TOP500 list today and says "computing is only for the rich". This is because we have an abundance of iPhones and gaming PCs in the consumer market, providing practically any application of computing that a consumer could want at very attainable prices. Similarly, practically any application of AGI will be accessible to consumers at attainable prices. Continued AI scaling after a certain point will be relevant mostly to industry (whose products will still be priced attainably, analogously to the way weather forecasts produced on TOP500 supercomputers are readily accessible to the public today).