[modeless]

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).