Don’t be too worried about AGI being a thing in the short. And the only thing which I find to suck with respect to consolidation is that contemporary AI requires a lot of hardware thrown at it while cloud services (providing this hardware on demand) are practically the same triopoly. That sucks if you want to be the next AI startup. But academia is mostly unaffected, and far from lagging behind (multiple open source LLMs are compelling alternatives to chatgpt and not benefitting from OpenAI’s millions of marketing and hype doesn’t make them less valuable)