Intelligence is the single most expensive resource on the planet. Hundreds of individuals have to be born, nurtured, and educated before you might get an exceptional 135+ IQ individual. Every intelligent person is produced at a great societal cost.
If you can reduce the cost of replicating a 135 IQ, or heck, even a 115 IQ person to a few thousand dollars, you're beating biology by a massive margin.
Also, just in terms of where to put your effort, if you think another direction (for example, fine-tuning the model to use digital tools, or researching how to predict confidence intervals) is going to have a better chance of success, why focus on scaling more?
Sprinkle in some more specific training and I can totally see entire divisions at IBM and Accenture and TCS being made redundant.
The incentive structures are perversely aligned for this future - the CEO who manages to reduce headcount while increasing revenue is going to be very handsomely rewarded by Wall Street.
It would be much easier to identify gifted kids and only educate them, but I happen to agree that universal education is better.
Is it so easy?
An equivalent AI won't have any agency and will be happy doing the boring work other 135 IQ humans won't.
IQ 1. can't be compared against generations of IQ tests 2. supposedly doesn't test education (of course, it actually does) 3. isn't real.
Even if we don't expend any cost on education the number of people with IQ 135 stays the same.
Edit: I don’t understand the downvotes. I don’t mean this in any disparaging way, just that an AGI is probably going to be a lot higher than that.