From a doomer/EA perspective, publicly saying that GPT5 is AGI or such would likely inspire & accelerate labs around the world to catch up. Thus it was more "Altruistic" / aligned with humanity's fate to stay mum and leave the situation cloudy.

No, it would not; they are already trying to catch up.

Having an existing example showing that something difficult is possible causes everyone else to replicate it much faster, like how a bunch of people started running sub-4-minute miles after the first guy did it.

If you know the outcome is favourable then you go all in. Right now the other competitors are just trying to match GPT4, if they knew AGI was achievable then they would throw everything they have at it in order to not be left out.

Show me the researchers and companies where the people in charge and the people doing the work don’t think it’s possible to get better than GPT-4 and are slow-rolling things.

I suppose maybe there are ones where they are slow-rolling because of their opinions about existential risk of AGI. But that’s not contingent on what OpenAI says or does.

And I can show you companies that have multiple other costly research projects. All in means all in.

I think they didn't anticipate sucha a large backlash, especially from investors. They felt the backlash threatens OpenAI, both its non-profit and for-profit arms, so they reverted their decision, which in my opinion was a mistake, but time will tell.

Yeah, I guess so. I keep waffling between thinking it's some 4d chess thing, and thinking it's just normal human fallibility, where the board just made a massive mistake in predicting how it would go. But I just struggle so much to imagine that, because everyone I know in the industry, regardless of their level of expertise or distance from OpenAI, immediately knew how big a deal it was going to be, when we heard he was hired. But supposedly the people on the board had no idea? I think this might be the right conclusion, but I nevertheless struggle to fathom it.

The board had the right non-profit long-term focus, but it didn't have the willpower to communicate and realize their vision. Ilya is a wonderful scientist, but not a great leader.

Yep, you nailed it, I think. Pity.