I think that they (OpenAI, Alphabet) think that the ladder can be climbed by leveraging GPT and LLMs until they have AGI. I think they think whoever gets AGI first takes all the chips off the table and rules the world forever forward. While these endless, idiotic debates happen as to whether GPT is or ever could be "alive" or whatever, they're actively employing it to build the one ring that'll rule them all. And I think the LLM model structure is capable of at least multiplying human intelligence enough to accomplish that over a couple more iterations, if not capable of conceiving the exact problems for itself yet.
There's also no real economic incentive to develop AGI that benefits everyone... Sam Altman's strangely evasive remarks to the contrary. There is every incentive to develop one for dominance. The most powerful extant tool to develop AGI right now is GPT-4.
I would love to read press articles that dove into this. There's a way of talking about more future-facing concerns that doesn't give people the impression that GPT-4 is magic but instead makes the much more persuasive point: holy crud these are the companies that are going to be in charge of building more advanced iterations?
There is no world where a company that ignores prompt injection solves alignment.