It is frequently suggested that once one of the AI companies reaches an AGI threshold, they will take off ahead of the rest. It's interesting to note that at least so far, the trend has been the opposite: as time goes on and the models get better, the performance of the different company's gets clustered closer together. Right now GPT-5, Claude Opus, Grok 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro all seem quite good across the board (ie they can all basically solve moderately challenging math and coding problems).

As a user, it feels like the race has never been as close as it is now. Perhaps dumb to extrapolate, but it makes me lean more skeptical about the hard take-off / winner-take-all mental model that has been pushed.

Would be curious to hear the take of a researcher at one of these firms - do you expect the AI offerings across competitors to become more competitive and clustered over the next few years, or less so?

Spoken like a true <insert derogatory term>.

I disagree. My paycheck stays what it is when I do not go shopping. Time keeps running out regardless of where my attention goes.

To me it seems that attention most certainly is a separate resource.

And more importantly, regardless of what it is, it is more important. Time is meaningless. My attention is not.