I imagine Sam's vision, both before and after this company change, is that he'll keep improving GPTs, while also setting up a thriving ecosystem through APIs, and AI will become a trillion dollar industry with him at the center.

From there, maybe someone will come up with the revolutionary advance necessary to reach AGI. It may not necessarily be under his company, but he'll be the super successful AI guy and in a pretty strong position to influence things anyway.

Just because that's the goal they have written on the tin doesn't mean that that is/was their actual goal.

Especially in the early days where the largest donor to OpenAI was Musk who was leading Tesla, a company way behind in AI capabilities, OpenAI looked like an obvious "Commoditize Your Complement" play.

For quite some time where they were mainly publishing research and they could hide behind "we are just getting started" that guise held up nicely, but when they struck gold with Chat(GPT), their was more and more misalignment between their actions and their publicly stated goal.