If OpenAI features were to freeze at what we have today I would be surprised if the company stayed around without a major pivot.
Again I'm in no on way saying this is actually the case, only a hypothetical since the tech is still very new and we don't know what we don't know.
This isn't really true. GPT4 is incredibly useful right now and being used by lots of business processes without any improvements being needed.
Every incremental improvement (eg Gemini 1.5 huge context window) opens up even more possibilities.
AGI isn't required at all.
The main problem with freezing is the moat disappears. Others are steadily catching up, and on specific benchmarks, even surpassing. Groq.com is insane wrt perf.
(Although we can make inform estimates on OpenAIs cost structure for serving models well enough to guess they are probably breaking even on it, or pretty close to it. Eg listen to the gradient dissent interview with the Together AI founders and it’s clear they are doing the same, and unless you think OpenAI is remarkably worse at serving technology it implies they are in the breaking even ballpark)
And we still don’t need AGI for it to be a great business.