If the world is not ready for fully scalable almost human tier intelligence then, being right at the wrong time is the same as being wrong.
Also you don't have to make people pay. Facebook doesn't charge end users for its products and neither does Google for either search or Android.
I mean, that does sound very much like the future of our current timeline, unfortunately.
There’s a shitton of companies willing to pay for it.
"Almost" being a synonym for "not".
It's not the same kind of intelligence as humans so it'll probably always have weird areas where it can't do as well (like counting letters in words), but that doesn't mean it isn't smart. If AI were sentient it could point at humans and say "haha look how dumb they are; 99.999% of them can't even write a basic Lean program".
We're way beyond the point where "it's not as smart as humans" is meaningful.
how are they gonna do that when the half-life of a GPU is 18 months?