alt Hacker NewsBecause whoever wins the AI race (assuming they don't overshoot and trigger the hard takeoff scenario) becomes a living god. Everybody else becomes their slave, to be killed or exploited as they please. It's a risky gamble, but in the eyes of the participants the upside justifies it. If they don't go all in they're still exposed to all the downside risk but have no chance of winning.
I don't expect hardware prices to go down unless the third option (economic collapse) happens before somebody triggers the dystopia/extinction option.
Just to add some slight nuance but is an important distinction,
They aren't all necessarily racing to be "god", some are racing to make sure someone else is not "god".
If it weren't for Altman releasing ChatGPT, it's very likely that we would have markedly less powerful LLMs at our disposal right now. Deepmind and Anthropic were taking incredibly safe and conservative approaches towards transformers, but OAI broke the silent truce and forced a race.