It's probably reasonably straightforward for well-connected VC people to raise $1bn from philanthropic rich people, which might have seemed like enough money at

It's probably reasonably straightforward for well-connected VC people to raise $1bn from philanthropic rich people, which might have seemed like enough money at the time to make progress on the problem of AGI. But I suspect they've realized that the actual amount of capital required to cover headcount (some of the most expensive employees in the world) and compute (some of the largest specific+expensive compute requirements out there) that would be necessary to advance the state of the art far enough to create a real product that might be cash-flow-neutral is probably on the order of $10-30bn. And that's a tremendous amount of money for a philanthropist or set of philanthropists to sink into, far more than even the most well-connected people can marshal in donations from American billionaires. And the government likely wouldn't funnel that kind of money into an organization that has only a few hundred people. So the only remaining route (or at least the easiest for a bunch of established capitalists) is to raise money as a for-profit venture.