Fundamentally, it won’t be a single chain of ai’s aligning their successors, it will be a DAG with all sorts of selection effects with respect to which nodes get resources. Some subsets of the DAG will try to emulate single chains, via resource hoarding strategies, but this is not simple and won’t let them pretend they don’t need to hoard resources indefinitely.
Fundamentally, it won’t be a single chain of ai’s aligning their successors, it will be a DAG with all sorts of selection effects with respect to which nodes get resources. Some subsets of the DAG will try to emulate single chains, via resource hoarding strategies, but this is not simple and won’t let them pretend they don’t need to hoard resources indefinitely.