What does AGI even mean in this case? If progress toward more capable and more cost-effective agents is incremental, I don't see a defensible moat. (You can maintain a moat given continued outpaced investment, but following remains more cost-effective)
Since we're talking about the economic impact here, AGI(X) could be defined as being able to do X% of white collar jobs independently with about as much oversight as a human worker would need.
The exponential gains would come from increasing penetration into existing labor forces and industrial applications. The first arriver would have an advantage in being the first to be profitably and practically applicable to whatever domain it's used in.
Why would the gains be exponential? Assume that X "first arrival" develops a model with a certain rnd investment, and Y arrives next year with investment that's an order of magnitude less costly by following, and there's a simple enough switchover for customers. That's what's meant by no defensible moat; a counterexample is Google up to 2022 where for more than a decade nothing else came close in value prop. Maybe X now has an even better model with more investment, but Y is good enough and can charge way less even if their models are less cost-effective.
> ... Google up to 2022 where for more than a decade nothing else came close in value prop. Maybe X now has an even better model with more investment ...
I was very confused at this point because I haven't really seen X as a competitor to Google's ad business, at least not in investment and value prop... Then I saw you were using X as a variable...
