Rest of your analogy/arguments are just a lot of nonsense too.
Electricity is valuable, and by that logic Siemens Energy should build and own all factories under the sun. TI should stop selling their calculators and compete in Math Olympiad instead!
Can they make more money doing this? I don't think so --- and apparently, they don't either.
Finance and equity markets would be the first place I would look to apply "super intelligence" for huge, quick cconomic returns.
Instead, they peddle "tokens". Wonder why?
These companies exist specifically to identify and take advantage of aberrations and inefficiencies in capital markets.
This is something I would expect "super intelligence" to excel at.
Why do AI companies rely on capital markets to keep them afloat?
Why? Because this is where all the money is. And because the survival of AI companies ultimately depends on the ability to earn more than they spend.
Well no, it's not. If finding inefficiencies in capital markets was the most profitable thing to do, the capital markets would never invest in anything but themselves. Recursion hits bottom somewhere and investors, at some point, want to invest in a real business, not just in a recursive investment vehicle.
The "capital markets" are not closed. The "market" itself doesn't decide what to invest in -- individuals and corporations do.
I would expect an individual/corporation armed with real "super intelligence" to have a distinct advantage in this regard --- wouldn't you?
What better way to prove the value of AI than applying it to earn mountains of money in the open market --- instead of setting mountains of the stuff on fire.
Yes, obviously there's a whole lot of relationship building and effort and judgement which matters at least as much as infrastructure in building businesses, but the whole schtick of Big AI is to insist their product is better than humans at planning and market analysis and building and sales and marketing and especially at effort and concentration, and they're obviously better capitalised than startups using AI to do something in a particular vertical, so if they believe their own hype, why not?
If they had pushed that argument, would it have changed how useful electricity is?