You stretched the analogy too far, to the point it doesn’t work at all. The advice to sell shovels works because shovels are cheap, already invented, simple, proven to work for their purpose, and can be bought in bulk. None of that is true in your analogy.
If anything you have it backwards and the LLMs (or eventually AGI) are the “gold” everyone is chasing. The low-effort crummy products that shove AI for the sake of hype and parting fools (mainly greedy investors afflicted by FOMO) from their money are the “pyrite”. A shovel in this sense would be something OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, etc would want.
If anything you have it backwards and the LLMs (or eventually AGI) are the “gold” everyone is chasing. The low-effort crummy products that shove AI for the sake of hype and parting fools (mainly greedy investors afflicted by FOMO) from their money are the “pyrite”. A shovel in this sense would be something OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, etc would want.