If frontier AI labs have unlimited shovels, what's stopping them from building everything?

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I found myself explaining AI tokens to my mom over the weekend. At first I related them to building bricks: blocks of data the model uses to understand and respond. Then I thought about it as we're all paying for tokens as units of work. Not just a shovel, but the work a shovel can do, like horses and horsepower. “Picks and shovels company” is the idea that a company sells the thing that is needed to do fundamental work. It comes from the California gold rush. Not everyone will find gold, but...