As noted, we need to discuss history of science and technology.

Regarding VCs, I haven’t dealt with them personally but in videos online where well known tech VC people talk about the business I’ve heard them say that they look for something like 20x returns because the clear majority of companies they invest in don’t make it through to profitability. I guess that picking the winning AGI team or teams more than a year in advance will be at least as hard and probably harder. Indeed, even if a safety orientated group such as SIAI supported 10 different promising AGI efforts, my feeling is that there would still be a significant chance of some other group getting there first. Once real AGI starts to look like a serious near term prospect to many people, there could even be thousands of groups trying from all over the world.

As for the source of investment funds, I’m thinking that it would come more from relatively well off people who were interested and passionate about this kind of thing.

As a modestly successful entrepreneur (www.sirgroovy.com), I disagree with you about the superiority of an investment model for raising funds. Venture and angel funding, as opposed to FFFF (Friends, family and fools funding) is almost exclusively limited to projects that either grossly misrepresent science (e.g. blacklight technologies) or promise a high probability of real results in a reasonable time-frame. Behavioral economics and my business experiences both agree that humans are not well suited for distinguishing probabilities between .1% and 10%, while any worth-while AGI venture will have to be in the top end of this range. Ben Goertzel also has a very good record of raising funds, but this is rare in AGI. He also has a very good record of identifying AI talent that was later recognized elsewhere by those with much greater resources.

The very best VCs don’t pick mostly duds. Hummer Winblad, for instance, gets a slight majority of its seed stage software start-ups to acquisition or IPO. Of course, they are very selective and only fund about 6 companies per year, as well as helping their companies a fair bit.

Economics dictates that most VCs pick mostly duds, as if VC was in general extremely profitable that would draw money in until most VCs were either unskilled clods or over funded and had no way to effectively use most of their money.

Kevembuangga is amusing. He calls SIAI idiotic and then immediately makes our chief assertion as if it’s his own idea.